Climbing Beatles Mountain: Covering All the Beatles Songs from A to Y

(following is the transcript of this video I made and posted on Youtube)

The focus of my project now is to cover all the Beatles songs from A to Y. There's no Z, no Beatles song starting with Z.

So A to Y, why did I take this up? I guess because I've loved the Beatles since I was a kid. They were my foundation group.

I started listening to them probably at the age of four or five, my earliest memories of being alive. A lot of them have to do with the Beatles listening to the Yellow Submarine or Sergeant Peppers albums. I think when I was six, I graduated to Abbey Road. A lot of this I write about on my blogs.

So the Beatles are a deep part of my childhood, my earliest memories. They were, you know, it was a love that I shared with my classmates, with my friends growing up in the 1970s. I think very few people weren't exposed to the Beatles at that point.

They had broken up. Their entire repertoire was available. And we were able to just go through all the Beatles albums from their earliest to their latest. And kind of pick up all the songs and get to know them.

I think by the time I was 12 years old, I had collected pretty much all their albums, at least the American versions. I think when I was a teenager, I started collecting the British versions, the imports.

So I knew their records up and down right and left. Their songs were deeply embedded in my head. And like I said, they were the foundation group for me. They were the group that all other popular music somehow in my head was compared to the Beatles was, you know, it either came out of the Beatles because I think all of the music I listened to in the 1980s was somehow influenced by the Beatles.

So they were, you know, a huge influence in my early life. And I later kind of rediscovered them, I guess, in my 20s and again in my 30s.

So you kind of once if you're a Beatles fan at a young age, you can you keep circling back to them. You'll go and explore other other bands, other kinds of music. I've, you know, over the decades, I've explored a lot of jazz, I've explored a lot of classical music, a lot of other popular music.

But I always come back to the Beatles. It's like a, you know, Mobius strip or something, you just kind of keep weaving back to the Beatles, re-grounding yourself in them. And things keep coming up that kind of remind you of how important they were. It might be a documentary film or a book that was just published or, you know, hey, they even come up with a new song now. And then you thought the Beatles were through.

You know, last year they popped out a new song. So something keeps bringing us back to the Beatles. And those of us who loved the band in childhood, I think you never lose that love, all the memories that you have of listening to their different albums, getting to know the different albums, the different songs, getting to know them as personalities, getting to know their individual characters and their voices.

And what they did after the Beatles is just an endless fascination. So these days, I listen to podcasts. I still, you know, occasionally will add a new book to my Beatles book collection.

And I continue to listen to their songs on a regular basis. And over the, you know, 30, 40 years that I've been playing piano and guitar, a lot of my inspiration for playing those instruments came from the Beatles, came from listening to their songs and wanting to reproduce them, wanting to sing them, wanting to play them, wanting to learn how they were structured, how the, how the chords worked, how the melodies worked, how the harmonies worked.

So over those decades, I mean, starting from when I was 10 years old and learned my first chords on guitar, you know, I was trying to learn Beatles songs, Eleanor Rigby, Get Back, Rocky Raccoon, all those songs that I wanted to know. Back in the USSR.

I think I learned my first bar chords to Back in the USSR. So, you know, so the Beatles were my first inspiration to want to play music, to want to sing songs.

And as I got more proficient in guitar and piano, I kept building up my repertoire with Beatles songs.

But, you know, far and away, I know more Beatles songs than any other band or any other popular artist.

So I probably already knew how to play somewhere between a third and half the songs that the Beatles ever wrote.

This project, I've decided to cover every single Beatles song. Well, maybe not everyone, but almost close to it.

And in doing so, I'm learning, you know, songs that I've never played before, never sang before, a lot of songs that don't fit nicely into the acoustic guitar repertoire or the piano repertoire.

Songs that are more obscure that you wouldn't expect people to play or sing or perform.

And those in addition to all the songs that I know and love and already have been playing for many years, and songs that are in between, songs that occasionally I've tried to play, but never really became part of my repertoire.

So I call this climbing Beatles mountain. It's like a pilgrimage for me to go into each song and experience it directly by trying to reproduce it the best way I can.

So mostly on guitar, I think most Beatles songs fit quite nicely on guitar and probably were composed on guitar.

Then there's another set of Beatles songs that, more or less written by Paul, who was working on piano.

And, you know, there are certain songs like Hello Goodbye and Hey Jude and Let It Be and Long and Winding Road and Lady Madonna.

Those kind of songs that almost demand to be played on piano.

There are certain songs that I feel are best played on piano even though you could play them on guitar.

But between piano and guitar, I think you can play pretty much any Beatles song ever written.

Obviously, you know, there are exceptions. Revolution 9. Come on.

No, that's not really a song, is it? It's more of an experiment in sound.

And as much as I appreciate and respect that being on the White Album as a kid, I listened to that incessantly and was always curious about how it was put together and what it all meant and what they were, all the different voices and what people were saying. But, you know, obviously that's not really a Beatles song, is it?

So there are, you know, a few exceptions. But all the songs written by Lennon and McCartney, the songs written by George Harrison, that for the Beatles, those are all candidates. They're all songs that I think any guitar or piano player with some experience can learn at least the basics without too much difficulty.

Right. So my goal, like I said, as a musician, is to be able to play songs that I can sing to, not to get too fancy with my piano work or guitar work, mostly just supporting the singing.

And yeah, it's been so far. It's been quite a fun experience. It is a practice. I have to, you know, basically I do this every morning after breakfast.

It probably takes me on average about 30 minutes to from practicing the song a little bit to get it down to performing it and recording it to putting it together as a video to posting it on YouTube.

I would say on average 30 minutes per song. So I'm spending, you know, maybe 90 minutes in the morning working on three Beatles songs. I try to get through at least three Beatles songs every morning as I build up.

I'm now in the Hs and the Is are next. Anybody who knows the Beatles songs know that the greatest number of songs that start with a letter is the letter I.

A lot of songs about I want. I won't. I, you know, I do this. I do that.

So, so the Is are next and I figure once I get through the Is, it's kind of downhill from there, getting through the rest of the letters.

But it's a fun experience. I do appreciate getting likes and especially comments from other people telling me that they liked the rendition I did.

But it's not a huge goal of mine to get a lot of likes or a lot of comments. It's more like I said, it's kind of a practice for me and it's a way for me to express my admiration for the Beatles to kind of pay homage to their incredible body of work.

And I really can't think of any other popular artist or group that has such a rich body of work as the Beatles in terms of loving and knowing all their songs, having specific memories with each song, each song being kind of a gem or a jewel or a pearl on a necklace.

There are a lot of, you know, there's a lot of bands that I love and with most bands or most artists, you know, I might have a dozen songs of theirs if it's if I really love that band or that artist that I know and love and can play and sing.

But with some, it might be more like, you know, with Bob Dylan, it might be 30 or 40 songs because I love Bob Dylan. But, you know, Bob Dylan wrote, I don't know, 500 songs. I mean, he wrote a lot of songs.

So I only know a small percentage of Bob Dylan songs. But I know all the Beatles songs. I love all the Beatles songs. There are certain songs I love more.

But there's no Beatles song that I don't like. There are songs that I like less than others. But there's really no Beatles song I can think of that I don't like or I don't have a positive memory of or doesn't make me smile when I listen to it.

So I think the Beatles are pretty quite unique in that regard, not just for me, but I think for millions of other fans out there, there was something incredibly unique and incredibly special about the Beatles, something that I think certainly not in our lifetimes will ever be repeated again.

And I think that we were all fortunate to have have been living in this age of the Beatles, you know, and I count my generation, especially fortunate because even though I was born when the Beatles broke up, I was still close enough in time so that they were still very relevant.

They were still very much a part of the culture. And even as a kid, I felt deeply connected to their songs and to their music and those connections have just become richer and more powerful over time.

So I consider myself incredibly fortunate. You know, I can think of several great musicians that I feel very fortunate to have have been living within a time frame when they still feel quite relevant and incredibly powerful from Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to the Beatles [ok I forgot to mention Duke Ellington!].

So that's all I'm going to say in this video. So thank you for your time. And if you like these videos that I'm posting, please, please do push the like button and feel free to give comments, even if they're critical comments, I also welcome critical comments as well.

I’m just happy that some people are listening to them and appreciating them and know and have, you know, and that the Beatles mean as much to them as they mean to me.

Cheers.

Being John Lennon: Some Thoughts on Reading the Lennon Bio by Ray Connolly

Readers of my blog know that I am a huge fan of the Beatles. I have been so since I was four or five years old. I have posted many entries about them in the past. For decades I’ve had an idea in the back of my head that someday I’ll write my own book about the Beatles and how they influenced my life. But that’s still just an idea.

Meanwhile, I do try to keep up with Beatles literature now and then. Last winter, while in the USA for a short visit, I picked up the book Being John Lennon by Ray Connolly (Pegasus Books, 2018). I’d been listening to the podcast Something About the Beatles frequently (and still do), and Ray came on as a guest and talked about his memories and experiences covering the Beatles as a journalist. He knew the Beatles and their entourage quite well and was present for many of the biggest moments in Beatles history. Robert Rodriguez, the podcaster, highly recommended his book and so I kept an eye out for it and finally scored it in a book shop in Berkeley, CA (book shops are a dying breed and we must do what we can to keep them alive.)

Author Ray Connolly

Like most of the books I collect while on the road, this one went onto my bookshelves, joining other Beatles books I’ve collected and read in the past. I had the intention of reading it this year, and eventually I got round to it. After starting the book in late September, I found myself hooked. Connolly is a good writer. He’s written novels, plays, TV shows, a bio of Elvis—the man can write. And it shows. The book is a real page-turner. I found myself digging into chapter after chapter. The chapters are short, there are a lot of them (64 to be precise) and each one digs into a nugget of John and Beatle history (the two are inseparable, even after their separation c. 1970). It’s a biography for sure, focusing on John’s life, from early childhood to his death in 1980. But it’s more than that. It’s an intimate portrait by a man who was both a journalist and a good friend—somebody who spent time in the intimate inner circle of Beatledom and continued to remain close to John after the group split up.

In terms of knowledge gained, I’d say the book mainly reinforces everything else I picked up over the decades of reading Beatles books, listening to podcasts, and watching doc films about the Beatles and about John Lennon. There are far more Lennon docs than any other Beatle. Let’s face it—John is by far the most interesting member of the Fab Four. I love the others just as strongly, the way one would love a group of dear uncles (the Beatles were basically my parents’ age, so they could have been my uncles in terms of age difference). Yet John stands out from the group as the main instigator of the band, and the most eccentric, creative, and outrageous personality of the lot. He was after all the oldest Beatle, so the others were like his younger brothers. As Connolly makes clear throughout his loving yet candid portrait of John, the Beatles was a family. They were like brothers, or sometimes, like a marriage. The book contains lots of references to John and Paul being “married” in a way through their songwriting partnership, and their breakup being like a “divorce,” and certainly Yoko seems to have thought of them in that way.

Young John and Auntie Mimi

John was special. The book certainly emphasizes that. First, his upbringing. He was basically abandoned by both his parents and raised by his stern yet loving Aunt Mimi and his Uncle George (bless them both). He did reunite temporarily with both parents in different points of his life but lost them both for different reasons. His mother was killed in an accident when he was young, and his dad was continually estranged and even after reconciliation in his later years, John ultimately rejected his father. Though it can’t explain everything about John, his alienation from his birth parents certainly had a huge influence on his life, his behavior, and his music. And that lasted until the bitter end of his life and career.

But what really made him special was his verbal and artistic genius. There is no doubt in my mind that John had a unique mind, and that was reflected in all his art and songwriting throughout his life, not to mention his capacity for verbal quips, puns, putdowns, and shattering humor. In this regard, he shared some of that talent with the other Beatles—they were certainly clever wordsmiths and full of humor, which contributed to their charm and ultimately to their success as a band. But John was off the charts. Just look at the songs he wrote and compare them to Paul and George’s songs, which are far more down to earth. John wrote the best Beatles lyrics, including “I Am the Walrus”, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and “Julia” (a song about his mother). Paul was certainly more gifted musically, which John realized, but John’s poetic abilities were stronger. When the band met Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s, it was John who really cottoned on to Dylan’s lyrical gifts and attempted to better him (and did in many ways), thereby changing the course of Beatles history and by extension the history of pop music.

I’m not saying John was a better lyricist than Bob Dylan. Dylan still holds the crown and deserves his Nobel Prize. But for a while, John put up a good fight, and musically he was more creative in my opinion. Dylan tends to take tried and true musical structures as his baseline and build incredible verses on top of them, but John’s musical structures were as complicated and rich as his lyrics. It helps that he had Paul with whom to bounce ideas. Collaboration was ultimately the not-so-secret sauce that made the Beatles great. But without John’s unique genius, they wouldn’t have achieved nearly what they did. That much is indisputable.

Connolly shows how John’s early interest in children’s literature like Lewis Carroll’s books and poems contributed to his wordsmithery. Even his song “I Am the Walrus” was taken from Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. As Connolly points out, the walrus in the story was the capitalist exploiter, not the carpenter, but as John pointed out, “I Am the Carpenter” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, and the walrus is a lot more fun.

Throughout his life, John was chomping at the bit for more creative pursuits, which explains his attraction to Yoko Ono. Not happy to just be a rock star or pop idol, he published his own books, wrote articles in news journals, and consistently drew throughout his life. His cartoon artworks are masterpieces of the form. As Connolly suggests, he could easily have been a cartoonist or an ad man—he also had the uncanny ability to come up with jingles and catchy refrains that would have made him rich on Madison Avenue. But instead, he chose the path of the true creative artist. Or did he? One never gets the sense that John or any of the Beatles wrote hits merely to rake in the dough. The only case where they were given a song title to work on as an assignment was for the film A Hard Day’s Night—and they created a masterpiece of rock and roll out of it.

In other words, John and the Beatles had a sense of integrity that is rare in the world of pop music, and getting increasingly so in my own opinion. Not to say they didn’t enjoy the cashola that flowed with each hit song, but obviously they were not businessmen. When Brian Epstein, their hardworking yet tragically addicted manager, died of what appears to be an overdose, they were suddenly thrown into the deep end of the pool, and these boys didn’t know how to swim in the shark-infested waters of the music industry. This partly explains their ultimate breakup, since John brought his own shark to the table, aka Allan Klein, while Paul preferred to work with his father-in-lawyer Lee Eastman (after he married Linda). John would come to regret bringing Klein into the picture, and Paul would have his I-told-you-so moment, but that would be years later, and in the meantime, the two ex-Beatles hurled musical thunderbolts at each other—these were the gods of songwriting after all, and until this day, it’s hard to think of anyone else who comes close.

John and Yoko in their favorite place: bed

Of course, the other explanation that often comes up when discussing the Beatles breakup is Yoko. Connolly is as fair as can be to John’s second wife, and hardly blames her for the Beatles bustup. He certainly is up front about her egotism, her cunning manipulations of other people, her opportunism, and her codependency on John, his money, and drugs (in that order). Yet he does spend time in the book discussing her artwork, which though not popular or widely regarded at the time, was certainly avant-garde, in-your-face, and pioneering in its own way. Johnandyoko (as he calls them, or perhaps they called themselves) loved to push the boundaries of both the art world and the world of popular culture and did so incessantly after they became a couple in the late 1960s. Whatever you say about Yoko, she comes across as a fascinating human being, one not to be reckoned with lightly, a person who was firm, fierce, and controlling, yet who in her own way was also a visionary. It’s easy to see how the two coming together caused so many sparks, and so much heat, if not a great deal of light.

Yoko was much older than John. If Cynthia became like a sister to him (which helps explain his impotence towards her later in their marriage), Yoko was a like a mother figure, and indeed he came to call her mother. Yet the relationship was a complicated one, not just the codependency, the drugs, and the “bed-ins”, the forays with political activism, but also in terms of their mutual fidelity. John after all was one of the most sought-after young men in the world, and had been surrounded by adoring women throughout his career as a Beatle, which didn’t help either of his marriages. Yoko was a twice-married woman with a husband (whom she divorced to marry John) and a daughter Kyoko, who her ex-husband Tony Cox took custody of when their marriage broke up.

Then there is the episode known as the “lost weekend,” as expressed in a sad joke the couple shared after the fact. As has been well documented in books, doc films, and her own autobiographical account, May Pang, the young 22-year-old assistant who worked for the couple in New York City, was approached by Yoko in a scheme to tame John’s ever-errant libido by becoming his temporary mistress. With Yoko’s approval, John and May became lovers, and of course (who could resist?) she fell in love with her boss man. Unlike Yoko, May was seriously into rock music (Yoko pretended I think but didn’t seem to really catch the vibe). May was young, tall, smart, capable, and good looking, and she and John became a natural couple very quickly in their relationship. Obviously, there was a great deal of mutual love if not respect (the respect like so many of John’s relationships was largely one-sided on her part).

John and May

May even put up with John’s worst behavior, exacerbated by his tendency to mix drugs and alcohol while partying with veteran rockers like Keith Moon, Alice Cooper, and Harry Nilsson. As Connolly puts it, he had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, a trait shared by many alcoholics, who seem quite charming when sober but get mean, ornery, and verbally and physically violent while under the influence. Connolly does not shy away from telling stories that reveal the dark side of the man. Yet, the devil’s pact they signed on to with Yoko at the beginning of their 18-month romance had to be paid in blood, so to speak. John eventually went back to Yoko, breaking May’s heart in the process, though he continued to see her secretly for years afterwards, and she remained a close confidante.

Eventually, the couple had a son, Sean Lennon, who was born strangely on October 9 1975, sharing the same birthday with his dad. Yoko’s obsession with numerology and astrology might have something to do with the unusual birth date. Sean quickly became the apple of their eye, and John spent several years in the Dakota apartments in NYC taking care of his son, though it’s dubious whether those were blissful years or not. After all, John was one of the world’s most gifted creative individuals, and it’s hard to imagine him content with diaper changing and toddler care. Nevertheless, Sean was certainly a great boon to the couple in their last years together. Eventually, John got off his rocker and started writing songs again, and by 1980 the album Double Fantasy came out, which shared John and Yoko songs (needless to say, John’s songs are the reasons the album is great).

As we all know too well, John’s life ended tragically and violently on the night of December 8, 1980. Connolly notes that anybody alive and above a certain age would remember where they were when they heard the sad news. I was in my bed when my step-dad came into the room early in the morning to tell me what had happened. “John Lennon was murdered,” he told me somberly. We were all deeply shocked by the news. I was in sixth grade back then, and our whole school was grieving as we took in the news. This was our own Kennedy moment. It was the first time someone who had been the object of so much love, affection, and high regard had been taken from us like that. To this day, I’ve never completely recovered from the shock of that day.

John Lennon would be 84 years old if he’d lived a long and healthy life. I won’t speculate how or why he was murdered—there are plenty of others who do so. It’s obvious there is more to the story than meets the eye. What I do remember is that that year his album Double Fantasy came out, and the radio stations were playing his songs in high rotation. “Watching the Wheels” is still one of my favorite Lennon tunes, and when I used to sing in karaoke pubs, “Just Like Starting Over” was one of me faves. I also think “Nobody Told Me” is up there with his best work.

While I don’t recall any great revelations or big stories I hadn’t known about already, the beauty of Connolly’s book lies in the details. There are all the conversations he gathered patiently and methodically over the years with John and others, the personal observations he has of the man and his life, the deep wisdom that age has brought to the writer, who has had a long lifetime to ponder the subject of his book. Connolly comes at the subject with a great deal of love and respect, deep honesty, and a sense that this is a “great man” in modern human history, all of which I share as a fan of John and the Beatles. “To know know know me is to love love love me” he once sang in the Cavern Club of Liverpool, and “yes it is, it’s true.” John was a “yes” man, for whom love was an art and a religion. Even if his own personal flaws and foibles prevented him from being as loving and caring to other humans as he could have been, that’s still the ultimate legacy of John Lennon and the Beatles, and their greatest gift to the world.

Gods, Guitars, and Guided Tours: Three Full Days in Tokyo with Local Guru James Farrer

Last week was the Chinese national holiday. I decided to take advantage of our week-long break from teaching and go pay a visit to my old friend and Shanghai Nightscapes co-author Dr. James Farrer, whom I hadn’t seen in person since the pandemic started in January 2020. I also hadn’t been back to Tokyo since 2018 and was long overdue for a visit. James has been living in Tokyo for nearly 25 years now, which is as long or longer than my sojourn in Shanghai. Over the years he has morphed from a China-focused sociologist to a Japan-focused one. At the same time, he has moved from researching sexuality (his first book Opening Up explores youth sexuality in 1990s Shanghai) to nightlife (our book) to food studies (his latest book is The Global Japanese Restaurant). His next big book project will be on the life of a neighborhood in Tokyo—his neighborhood of Nishi-ogikubo—and it promises to integrate all his research interests together into a fine package.

James teaches sociology at Sophia University, a Jesuit university located in Yotsuya in the middle of Tokyo. I’ve been there many times over the years, have given many talks and screened my films there before. This time I had the opportunity to screen my latest film “A Century of Jazz in Shanghai” and to give a talk about the jazz scene in Shanghai. I also took many walks around different neighborhoods of Tokyo, mostly with James, and I saw a concert of Japanese jazz artists on my final night. Throughout my brief sojourn there, I sampled many different varieties of Japanese cuisine, witnessed a religious ritual in a Buddhist temple, and worshipped guitars at a Fender flagship store. Here are some of the highlights of my three-day trip to Tokyo.

I arrived on Wednesday, October 2, and made my way from Haneda Airport by trains to Yotsuya. At Haneda, I purchased a Suica, a plastic card that proved quite handy throughout my trip. I highly recommend that visitors to the city get this card at the airport, since you can use it to swipe the train entrances and exits and pay for your fare instead of buying tickets each time. You can also use it in convenience stores and in the ubiquitous vending machines that are everywhere and sell nearly everything (drinks in particular).

James gave me instructions on how best to get to Yotsuya: “There are multiple ways to get from Haneda to Sophia. The best, I think, is to take the Monorail from Haneda to Hammatsucho 浜松町. Then take the Yamanote Line to Kanda　神田駅, and from Kanda take the Chuo Line to Yotsuya　四ツ谷駅. So you change trains twice, but the distance you travel within the stations is quite short.  Sophia 上智大学　is right in front of the station.” I followed these instructions to the letter and it took around 1:20 to get there.

On the campus of Sophia University getting ready for my screening

I met James at his office and we walked around campus for a while and met a colleague or two before setting up for the screening and the talk. The talk was attended by a dozen or more people, not a big crowd but certainly a captive audience for the film. Afterwards, the audience members asked many excellent questions about the film and about the jazz scene in Shanghai. Then James took me and two other colleagues to dinner at a nearby yakitori (bbq chicken) restaurant in an alley across from Yotsuya station. After dinner, we headed to his home in the neighborhood of Nishi-ogikubo, located to the west of Yotsuya and Shinjuku, one of the main stations and central areas of Tokyo.

a post-talk dinner at an Edo-style yakitori restaurant in Yotsuya

James and his wife Gracia live in a modest yet cozy home in a low-rise neighborhood. It’s around a twenty-minute walk to and from the station. I found it hard to recognize the streets and alleys leading to their home, since they all seem to look alike as do the houses, and James told me he got lost the first few times after they moved there, but obviously he knows it like the back of his hand now. He and Gracia walk to and from their home to the station every day. Once on the train it takes James around fifteen minutes to get to his uni from that neighborhood, and for Gracia who teaches at Waseda, it’s about the same. So maybe a 45-minute commute from home to school.

One thing about Tokyo is that taking the trains is an essential part of city life. In Shanghai I’m quite spoiled—I usually drive my own car or else take a didi (hired cab) to get places. Seldom do I use the metro, although it is quite well developed in Shanghai now. I can even get from Shanghai to my home in Kunshan on the metro now. But I find driving from point A to point B a lot more comfortable and convenient, even though in Shanghai I have to drive through the usual mess of urban traffic to do so.

In Tokyo, fewer people own cars and most people use the train and subway system to get where they are going. For over twenty years I’ve been going to Tokyo for occasional visits, and each time I have to relearn the system of JR lines (the overground lines) and subway lines, which are all connected. I also need to relearn the names and locations of the neighborhoods that compose the city. It must be quite bewildering to foreign visitors who don’t know the language. I’m fortunate in that I know Chinese and can recognize the kanji (characters) and I also took a few years of Japanese language in grad school, so I have little trouble remembering the place names, and could ask for directions if necessary. But I must confess, and this is an ongoing theme of all my visits to Japan, that my language skills aren’t nearly as well developed as I’d like them to be. While I have a pretty solid foundation, I find myself struggling to understand people when they speak at a normal pace, let alone respond in a proper way.

The following day, my first full day in Tokyo, James left early for work, and I accompanied Gracia to the station via their usual pathways. I met James in Yotsuya Station at noon, and we headed to another neighborhood where he was giving a tour to some students. This was the Fukagawa neighborhood, which is east of the Sumida River (sumidagawa), a main river running through Tokyo. This was once a working class neighborhood where commoners who served the needs of the elite samurai and daimyo society of the Tokugawa era lived. It was also a temple district.

The Fukagawa Inn where we had lunch

We had lunch at a special restaurant that serves old Edo style food, the kind of food the locals used to eat back in the old days. We enjoyed a lunch of rice cooked with clams (a fisherman’s meal), and another rice dish that if I recall correctly was a carpenter’s meal.

The carpenter’s and fisherman’s meal

Afterwards we hung out in a trendy little café on the third floor of a building along with some young Japanese hipsters. At three pm, we met the students at the Fukagawa Edo Museum. There we explored the life of this old part of the city during the Tokugawa era. The museum provides a reproduction of an old Edo neighborhood replete with stories about the shop and home owners who occupied that neighborhood a few hundred years ago. The highlight of our visit to the museum was joining an 84-year old Japanese guide as he passionately explained the different ways that people ate and drank, celebrated the moon festival, and fought fires. There’s an impressive fire tower in the exhibit and the windows of the tower point in all directions except for the Shogun’s palace. I love exhibitions that bring history to life, and this one was enchanting—there was even a cat on the roof of one home that howled every now and then.

an 84 year old guide tells us about the fire tower behind him while we enjoy Edo-style tea

After visiting the museum, we went to a nearby park, Kiyosumi Gardens 清澄庭园 with a pond and gardens dating back to the Tokugawa era. These gardens dating back centuries provide a welcome interlude to the hustle and bustle of Tokyo.

Then we walked along a canal pathway while communing with the great poet Basho who once lived in this historic neighborhood. James took us to a Tantric Buddhist temple, where we experienced a full-on ceremony led by the monks and priests of the temple that included chanting and singing, drums and bells, and blessing objects in a ritual fire. The ceremony lasted around 30 minutes and was a deep dive into local Buddhist culture. Other audience members lined up for the monks to bless their bags and belongings by waving them over the ritual fire. I suppose I should have done the same.

inside the temple (we weren’t supposed to photograph the ritual so I didn’t, but I do have an audio recording of it)

After James’s tour ended, we parted ways with the students and got on the train, hoping to make it to another academic talk at Sophia, but we found ourselves running late and starving, so we bagged the talk and instead went to a canalside restaurant to have dinner. After that, we wandered through Shinjuku, checking out the various nightlife districts that make up this district, including the famous Kabukicho and Golden Gai areas. We found both to be full of curious foreign tourists from countries all over the world. According to James, the nighttime establishments of these famous nightlife districts, once closed off to most foreigners, are now eager to seek the foreign tourist business, especially in light of the pandemic which put a huge dent in the mizu shobai or “water trade” of Tokyo.

at an English language bookshop in Jimbocho

The following day, after enjoying a curry rice lunch at a neighborhood restaurant with a Michelin rating, James brought me to the area of Jimbocho, where we cruised the numerous bookshops that line the streets and alleys of this neighborhood. I was quite amazed at the quality of the second-hand English language bookshops, which carry beautiful hardbound and weighty books in the fields of literature, history, and philosophy. There are also countless Japanese bookshops that specialize in different types of literature, and huge collections of ephemera such as old magazines, maps and other materials. You could spend days exploring this neighborhood, especially if you are a bibliophile like me. Later I met another friend named Jeff who was in town for a visit, and we cruised up and down the “guitar street” of neighboring Ochanomizu, a locality named for the high quality of the water (mizu) which was ideal for making tea (ocha) for the shogun or emperor. This street features numerous guitar shops selling new and used electric and acoustic guitars, causing any guitarist to drool at all the models displayed on the walls and windows.

After our window-shopping expedition, Jeff and I joined James back in his own neighborhood of Nishi-ogikubo, where he has become a local celebrity for his knowledge of the shops, businesses, restaurants, cafes, and bars and the people who run and frequent them. For many years, James has run a blog focusing on his neighborhood, and recently he hosted a TV show for NHK World where he took a tour of the hood. James took us on a brief walking tour of the neighborhood around the train station, which goes back a century and half to when the area was farms and fields, and has developed rapidly and urbanized to become a part of Tokyo since the 1920s. We then had dinner at a local restaurant that specializes in mackerel, and James took us on a tour of the warren of alleys that surround the station, full of little bars and eateries. We settled in a bar run by a Chinese migrant from Suzhou, who was very friendly and knows James well, and hung out with some Japanese customers (it was mostly a male crowd). Then we headed down the alley to a tiny sunaku bar where James is also familiar with the owners, and we sang karaoke songs for a while. I got to relive my old days in Sapporo and sing a few Japanese enka folk tunes that I still astonishingly remember after all these years. I was pleased to find that the old karaoke bar culture of Japan still thrives in these little neighborhoods.

James showing off his Nihongo with a Japanese song

The following day was my last full day in Tokyo. After getting some rest in the morning, James and I headed out to meet Jeff at another neighborhood in the northern part of the city not far from Ueno. We took the trains to Nippori station, met Jeff there, and then walked over to the area known as Yanaka Ginza, a quaint area lined with shops, bars, and restaurants with an old Edo feel to it. We walked around in a light drizzle as people held umbrellas over their heads. Again there was a surprising number of foreign tourists in the neighborhood. In addition to shops and restaurants, there are also many temples and graveyards in the area. Graveyards in urban Japan are next to temples, unlike in China where graveyards are placed deep in the countryside away from people.

Entering Yanaka Ginza

After walking around the neighborhood and enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee in an old kisaten run by an elderly Japanese woman, we headed by train to Harajuku, where Jeff and I walked through the trendy cosplay neighborhood to the Fender Flagship Store and oggled the expensive and flashy guitars that lined the walls of the four-floor establishment.

A display at the entrance to the Fender Flagship Store in Harajuku

We then went to Shinjuku where we had a light dinner at an Oden restaurant. Oden are boiled snacks like tofu, daikon or radish, and other treats in a clear broth—they are popular in Chinese convenience stores as well.

After dinner we found the Pit Inn, an underground jazz club in the nichome district of Shinjuku. My old friend and fellow Dartmouth alum Cliff, who has lived in Japan a few years longer than James, had reserved seats for us. He was running late, and so we settled in the club along with others called in by the managers to sit in rows of seats in front of the stage. Eventually the band came out and started playing. Cliff arrived a bit later and so did James.

The band was the Setagawa Trio, composed of a pianist, a bass player, and a drummer. They have been playing together for nine years and have cut two albums. Their latest album called Progress came out in 2023.

The three musicians, all thirty-something Japanese men, played two sets. They’d clearly been playing together many years and had a fine onstage rapport with each other and with the crowd. I thought the bass player was the show-stealer. He was a large framed man with a funky hat and a beard who played a huge upright bass with tremendous joy and passion. At one point he even broke a string and had to replace it onstage while the piano player filled in with a jaunty piece.

The trio was obviously grounded in classic jazz, but they had an experimental side to them and they obviously enjoyed pushing the envelope with their music. I heard a few standards such as “Stella by Starlight”, “Li’l Darling”, “Make Someone Happy” and at the end of the concert, for an encore they performed their own version of John Lennon’s “Imagine”. They also played a few original compositions. All in all it was very high level playing that could have been heard in the best jazz clubs of any world class city. The experience made me wonder if I ought to make a film about Japanese jazz someday.

After the concert ended around 10 pm, we went our separate ways and James and I wended our way in the rain through the gay quarter of Shinjuku, which once again was full of foreigners, before heading back to the station to take the train to his neighborhood and walk back to his home.

The next day I caught my flight back to Shanghai, taking the trains to Haneda Airport from James’s neighborhood. It was a smooth journey, and I felt fairly comfortable riding the trains. I am certain that if I spent a few months in Japan, my language skills would be greatly solidified, but alas, that hasn’t happened in all the years since I first lived in Sapporo in the summer of 1993. But that is a story for another occasion.

I’ve always been impressed with how well Japanese society seems to integrate traditional cultures with modern everyday life and this trip offered many opportunities to experience that integration firsthand, especially when it comes to food and religion. On the other hand, Tokyo is such a frenetic society. People are always on the move, and the quintessential Tokyo experience is getting caught up in the mad rush of commuters in enormous stations like Shinjuku. People also seem perrenially tired, and I see a lot of snoozers on the trains.

The other impression I’m always left with when I visit is what I call the otakuness of Japanese society. Otaku means someone who delves deeply into a small subcultural phenomenon, and I may be misusing the term, but I apply to all the cases where people are obsessed with some particular taste culture, whether it’s collecting old rock and roll magazines or running a restaurant that specializes in mackerel or a bar that only serves genuine bourbon from the Deep South (of the USA). With everyone lining up for seats and then sitting there quietly (except when applauding) throughout the entire performance, even the jazz club had an otakuness to it that Shanghai clubs don’t seem to have. That tendency to delve deeply into one very specific pursuit or cultural interest seems to be very characteristic of Japanese society, which is one of the many things that makes Tokyo an endlessly fascinating city to explore. 

Impressions on Seeing Gary Wang and the JZ Band at the New JZ Club on Hengshan Road

(I admit I’ve been quite derelict in not keeping up with posting on my website. There are reasons for this dereliction, though I’m not sure exactly what they are. Suffice it to say I have been in a bit of a writing slump lately, but the first step to the cure is to admit the problem. The second step is to start writing again.)

Last night I joined around 20 DKU students at the JZ Club in Shanghai. I had organized this special “field trip” along with our Jazz Club president Jesse Campbell. We met at the club around 7 pm to see the JZ Big Band perform a set of arrangements by conductor Gary Wang (Wang Kaiji). Throughout the performance, the conductor and arranger interspersed the songs with lengthy explanations of them in Chinese. The majority of guests were Chinese so I suppose that made sense, though it might have been nice to have a few brief summaries in English for the non-Chinese-speaking customers. Nevertheless, it was a fine mixture of music and musical education for the audience. Many of the customers brought their spouses, friends, and families, and there were many children in the audience.

Our “field trip” group of Duke Kunshan University students, sponsored by the Jazz Club. Club president Jesse Campbell is just below Nick Xue posing with Alec Haavik in the back.

I will not belabor the reader with lengthy descriptions of the pieces and their arrangements. Instead, I’ll just describe them as long, grand, intricate, winding, full of delicious inuendoes. These were smoothly satisfying compositions that blended all the instruments together into a mélange of melodies, ideas, and textures while giving plenty of soloists a chance to soar above the orchestra. The 20-piece band represented the A-list of Shanghai jazz musicians, including a piano player on a Yamaha Grand piano, an upright bass player and a drummer, a trumpet section, a trombone section, a saxophone section, and other reed players including a flutist. You can find their names on the poster promoting the event:

A closer view of the horn section with trumpets, trombones, sax and other reeds

Now I would like to share some of my own impressions of the scene and the setting, and how the music made me feel over the course of the evening concert.

Arriving at the venue by Didi (China’s equivalent to Uber), I found myself in a new restaurant and bar zone called No. 8. The JZ Club recently moved from its previous location in the subterranean zone known as Found 158 to this present location. This was my first experience with the new JZ Club. To find it, you walk down a narrow pathway off of Hengshan Road, not far from the corner of Wulumuqi Road. You stroll past the main bar and restaurant area of the No. 8 Zone, following the beacon of the red JZ sign. The entrance to the club is very modest and a bit mysterious. It leads underground down a set of stairs to the club two floors below.

The modest club entrance off of Hengshan Road

The main hall of the club is cavernous with a high ceiling. The club is decorated in red with red lighting and red curtains. The stage is large and in front of the stage is a large polished wooden floor area filled with small round tables lit by LED lamps. There are semi-circular sofa seating areas behind the tables, and then up a level is the bar at the back of the room. On the two wings are elevated spaces for people to sit as well. All the seating is arranged by ticket price. For the lower price of our tickets, we took the area in the wings. The high barstools we sat upon weren’t too comfortable, and I had to get up and stretch now and then, but we certainly had a good view, if an oblique one, of the stage. During the show I went around and took photos from different angles. There is no spot in the club that doesn’t afford a good view of the stage. The sound quality is good as well, and unlike the previous venue there are no loud neighbors to disturb the performances (in the Found 158 venue, you could hear the boom-boom of nearby discos reverberating through the walls).

Even though the new venue works well as a performance space, highlighting the excellent musical talents of the Shanghai jazz scene, it doesn’t feel quite as cozy as the two previous venues. The now legendary club on Fuxing Road and the previous one in Found 158 felt more like comfy hangouts where it was as much about sociability and meeting cool cats in the scene as it was about the music itself. In the new JZ Club, the music seems to be the highlight, and socializing has taken a back seat. At least that was my impression of the new space. It feels too cavernous for an intimate jazz lounge and designed more as a performance theater. I will have to come back again perhaps later in the evening to see if the social environment of the previous JZ still thrives.

All in all, I think it was a wise decision for the club to move out of Found 158, which had become a kind of “foreigners’ ghetto” over the years with its rowdy beer halls and restaurant bars and discos (though since the pandemic, most of the customers are now Chinese). The new location on Hengshan Road is far more elegant and befitting of the upscale vibe that the club wishes to project, even if the No. 8 Zone hasn’t quite caught on yet with the fashionable Shanghai crowd. And the space is far more protected from errant sounds. Certainly, the new JZ Club succeeds as a performance venue.

Alec Haavik taking a solo

Highlights of the evening included solo performances by bandleader and lead tenor sax player Alec Haavik, as well as lead trumpet player Jeremy Sinclair, two of the finest foreign fixtures of the Shanghai jazz scene. Solos by sax players Nick Xue, Huang Ye, and others rounded out the evening, and we even enjoyed a few piano, bass and drum solos. (I’d have to go back into my recording of the evening’s performance to analyze the performance any further.) After the final song of the evening, the band was encouraged to do a lively encore of more old-style jazz which gave many players a chance to do one more groovy solo.

Throughout the performance I was thinking about what a shame it is that jazz has become almost completely separated from the dancing that characterized the great Jazz Age of the 1920s-1930s. If this band had been swinging these tunes in that era, the floor would have been full of dancers decked out in their finest tuxedos and ballroom gowns, swishing away and switching partners on the floor. Now everybody sits quietly and compliantly in their seats, watching the band (though I noticed a lot of the guests were constantly on their phones or else using them to video the show). Back then, people entered a social scene and took risks, showing off their dancing and their social skills and helping to create the scene. I feel that our present world is far more passive and flaccid in comparison, and though I take pains not to glorify the old days (especially in Shanghai during a violent era of famine, disease, revolution, and war) I feel we’ve lost a big piece of our collective humanity.

A broad view of the stage and main floor from the wings

Some of our students also remarked on how the new place (like so many clubs today) is set up to maximize potential profits with tables clustered up to the stage, not allowing much if any room for dancing or socializing on the main floor. In this sense it operates more as a restaurant or fixed-seat theater. I know there are times when they change the arrangement to accommodate dancers, particularly on the swing dance nights that Alec and his band the Shindiggers lead, and I should go and attend one of those events to see how it goes. But while listening to the epic sweep of the jazz orchestra last night, I did feel a sense of yearning, a nostalgia for a lost era of elegance, decadence, bravery, and risk-taking. Someday we will all mourn the loss of the Dancing Age. True, there are other clubs where you can go that feature dancing (though the dance floors have shrunk a great deal since the dance-crazy age of the 1990s), but wouldn’t it be nice to have more of it at the JZ and other jazz clubs?

Binging The White Lotus: A Tragicomic Series on HBO

Last week, I watched the first season of the much touted HBO series The White Lotus for the first time. Being sick with Covid over the past three days gave me the chance to binge the second season. That these are six- and seven-part series respectively makes it easier to binge a season as opposed to the typical 10-to-13-part series for many shows. The two seasons are very similar in some respects. Both take place in an international resort hotel called The White Lotus in an exotic location.

Season 1 unfolds in Hawaii. Season 2 happens in Sicily. Both are beach and poolside resorts giving ample opportunities for parades of flesh. Apparently Season 1 was filmed during pandemic restrictions which limited the variety of settings. Most of the action takes place in the hotel or on the beach. Certainly, it doesn’t do justice to the gorgeous variety of Hawaii that one comes to know and love over many visits to its different islands. Season 2 offers a more lavish portrayal of Sicily including the beach town of Taormina where the hotel is located, and the city of Palermo. It is far lusher visually, much more integrated with the locality, and will make anyone who sees it want to visit Sicily (I know I do). No wonder the Italian government offers a 40% tax break to make such shows in country.

In terms of themes, the first season is focused on the haves versus the have-nots with a healthy dose of colonialism thrown in for good measure. It's somewhat of a Gatsbian tale with wealthy, privileged, and connected people getting away with irresponsible behavior while causing collateral damage to those less fortunate around them. The entire ensemble does a fantastic job of portraying these intertwining characters and stories. The scene stealer in Season 1 is Armond, the hotel manager, who is a wound-up ball of mad energy and so much fun to watch. None of the other characters is likeable except Belinda the spa staffer (who is mistreated in the end) and perhaps Quinn, the sullen teenage son who ends up joining a squad of local Hawaiian rowers. Hands down the most uplifting scenes are of Quinn getting Shanghaied each morning on the beach to join the Hawaiian bros on their craft. And the breaching whale is a touch of magic.

Season 2 hovers around the theme of illicit sexuality, with a craven carnival of concupiscent carnality leading to carnage by the end. Again, the ensemble cast do impeccable jobs of portraying various modes of the human condition, including horniness, excess, selfishness, peevishness, jealousy, irresponsibility, duplicity, and dissatisfaction. In Season 2, my two favorite characters are the gorgeous young local hooker Lucia and her talented musician friend Mia, who frequent the hotel and seek gainful opportunities by manipulating various guests and staff members, outwitting them at every turn.

The only person to appear fully in both seasons is the dysfunctional and physically and emotionally bloated heiress to a massive fortune named Tanya McQuoid. Her terse lover and then husband Greg also appears in Seasons 1 and 2. While Jennifer Coolidge’s performance of Tanya is outstanding and one of the highlights of both seasons, I found her character and role to be the least believable in the series. How could a woman so amazingly wealthy be traveling abroad to such exotic locales alone and unprotected? Basically, she is shark bait.

(Spoiler alert) When her mysterious aging and obviously ill hotel neighbor Greg falls for her, we know something is up but we’re not sure what. Is this just a casual fling of opportunity? Given her physical and emotional unattractiveness (though she sure knows how to dress the part), why should a guy like Greg jump into bed with this woman? He makes clear on several occasions in his gestures that he is repulsed by her, yet he wants to sleep with her nonetheless. Later in Season 2, we find that Greg has married Tanya and later it is revealed that he is indeed plotting to get rid of his wife and claim the bounty of her inheritance. For this nefarious task he employs an old British expat friend based in Sicily named Quentin (played with great finesse by Tom Hollander) along with his gay companions. When Tanya shows up in Sicily with only her assistant, a clueless young American girl named Portia out for an adventure, only to be abandoned by Greg who returns to the USA for mysterious purposes, we know trouble is brewing. Eventually the odd companions figure this out, but only after it is too late to avoid the consequences.

It is hard to imagine that a woman like Tanya with that much financial clout wouldn’t be surrounded with an entourage of people serving all her needs including protection from all the hustlers, opportunists and other evil doers who must circle around such people like sharks. And how could she not hire better assistants? She claims at one point that she has bad luck hiring people, but come on, this woman has access to half a billion dollars. Is there any reality to this scenario? And yet it drives a significant portion of the plot.

Most of the other scenarios are more believable, with families and friendships festering with internal conflicts, rivalries, and secrets. In Season 1, the emasculated father Mark, powerful mother Nicole, college age daughter Olivia, and teenage son Quinn portray an authentically dysfunctional family dynamic that strikes me as somewhat universal. Only the classmate friend of Olivia, a girl of color named Paula, has a bit more nuance and bravado as a character, if in a tragic vein. The story of the newlywed couple Shane and Rachel strikes me as realistic. He is a wealthy and arrogant young man who can’t stop complaining about everything that doesn’t go his way and thinks money is the cure to every problem, while she is a beautiful and idealistic young woman from a modest background who must now come to terms with having married into the moneyed class.

The trio of men in Season 2, including the patriarch Bert (played fantastically by F Murray Abraham, who is the main reason I wanted to see this show in the first place), his son Dominic (played by Michael Imperioli of Sopranos fame) and grandson Albie are fun to watch as they attempt to discover their ethnic and family roots in Sicily while dealing with issues of infidelity and sexual addiction. Meanwhile, the foursome of thirty-somethings who get tangled in their own sexual rivalry of sorts are amusing to watch and they put on a credible show as they sort out the complex dynamics of their new relationship. “Alpha Dog” Cameron reminds me of a typical Dartmouth fraternity bro who went on to NYC to engage in high finance. High octane testosterone runs through his veins. His college roommate Ethan “Big E” is an introverted and nerdy guy, who made it big when he sold his tech company. Now Cameron is angling to get into a business relationship with his long-lost pal. Meanwhile, their wives Harper and Daphne are trying to come to terms with each other’s alien value system and outlook on life while dealing with the explosive and troublesome friendship between the two bros. Toxic masculinity is a keyword here. While none of these characters are likeable in any real way (expect perhaps the kind-hearted Albie though he is hopelessly naïve—and maybe that’s why we root for him in the end, like some hapless character in a Woody Allen film) they come across as real and nuanced people.

Yet ultimately what I find unconvincing is how the main characters all leave the country at the end of each season just after major crimes have been committed and need to be investigated and prosecuted. They are not detained as witnesses to sort out the sordid details of said crimes. Is this an indictment of the Hawaiian and Italian justice system a la Ripley (also a fantastic series recently aired by Netflix)? It seems incredibly naïve to think that major theft and murder cases would be left to the locals to tie up, while the perpetrators, abettors, and witnesses fly away unscathed. The end of each season turns tragic, so you could say this is a tragicomedy masking as a dark situational comedy.

Despite these caveats, the series was a great deal of fun and a blessed distraction from my second round of Covid. Sometimes laughing at others’ pain eases your own. And the next season which takes place in Thailand—one of my favorite places on the planet— will surely be just as delightful.

My Top Five Beatles Albums and their Significance as Artists

A few years ago while suffering from insomnia in the solitude of my apartment, I gave a late night soliloquy about the Beatles. I’d been reading some books about the band, and it was the 50th anniversary of Abbey Road so I had Beatles on the brain. I recorded my musings on my iPhone, and ended up with this 5000-word discourse focusing on five of their top albums in my own reckoning, which I transcribe below. Over the past two days, I edited the recording and added some visuals to make a video for YouTube and a podcast of sorts. So, here goes:

So, introducing the Beatles, which came out on VJ Records in July 1963, and there's the UK version, and the US, I guess this is the US version. I'm thinking it has I Saw Her Standing There, Misery Anna, Chains, Boys, Love Me Do, Baby, it's You, Do You Want to Know a Secret, A Taste of Honey, There's a Place, Twist and Shout. So, there's that album, which really started their career.

Now, there's the UK version, which is basically, Please, Please Me. So, it has, I Saw Her Standing There, Misery, Anna, Chains, Boys, Ask Me Why, Please Please Me, Love Me Do. P.S. I love You, Baby, it's You, Do you Want to Know a Secret, A Taste of Honey, There's a Place, Twist and Shout. So, it's quite interesting that the American version didn't have the song Please Please Me. I can talk about the two different versions, the one with and without Please Please Me. And then talk about all of their influences as they were forming their band and forming their sound and their style. And I think it just reflects how the Beatles were like sponges absorbing all these various influences in music without prejudice. You know, they were taking from so many different sources, so many different musical genres. It was borrowing so much and then integrating it into this, evolving into our style that they had, which made the Beatles so fascinating that, in 1959, in the 60s, and these were, you know, more sophisticated, much more sophisticated, much more imaginative.

Much more, you know, sophisticated, much more imaginative, creative, lyrical musicians. And obviously, their story has been told again and again. There are dozens of books that you can read to get a sense of their story and how they develop their sound and everything that was going on in their lives. And I think as part of this project, I'm not so interested in telling their own life stories or retelling all the anecdotes that surround their songs, except when really necessary. Because I think the principle of art is that art is transcendent. So it's important to, in a way, detach the artwork from the artist. Of course, it helps to know the lives of the artists. But I find that a lot of the analysis of the Beatles gets too caught up in the details of their lives and the anecdotes that they use to explain their art.

I remember in high school, we learned about this fallacy of taking the artist at their word. I think great art transcends the artist. So you have to take it out of the context of the artist and what he was going through because great art tells a much deeper story. It delivers a deeper message. And that's the power of great art. It's transcendent. It's not caught up in the detail. It's not like a diary of that specific person's life or what was going on at that moment. Although some of the Beatles’ songs are kind of like diaries, journals, journaling their life story.

But I think what makes these albums great is that they're archetypal. Each of those albums represents a different stage of human development and also some of the fundamental themes of the human experience. So going back to the beginning when they're still kind of coming out of their teenage years and discovering love and sex and kind of the freedom of being dependent on their parents to being these young adults in the process of discovering their own power. And those songs are very thrilling. They're very happy and energetic, not that original because a lot of their songs as I said were covers. So the Beatles were, they started out like most bands. They started out as great cover artists. They became masters at covering other people's songs. And they had a couple of their own. But even their own original songs were pretty derivative. Like they sounded like the artists that they were admiring at the time.

So for example, Please Please Me sounded like Roy Orbison, maybe a sped up version of a Roy Orbison song, whom they deeply admired. But obviously they were showing their creative powers with that first album. But anyway, that album, Please Please Me or Introducing the Beatles, I think that represents the energy, the excitement of youth. Obviously, you know, it's about falling in love. There's, there are a lot of sexual themes in the songs. It's just about kind of libidinous energy dancing. They were coming out of, you know, playing in Hamburg, coming out of playing in the cavern club in Liverpool. So it's really, these are dance tunes. They're meant to get an audience shaking. They're, you know, it's the kind of music that they eventually got whole stadiums of young, especially girls screaming at the top of their lungs. That kind of libidinous youthful energy. So that's album, you know, that’s the last album that we're going to, so we're going to go backwards. So, you know, we're going to go backwards from, from their, their last album to their, to their earliest.

So, but the first stage is youth and pleasure and fun and thrill and kind of all the things that, you know, young people, young people get into. Not too much thought. There's not a lot of, you know, reflection and thought and it's just a very kind of energetic, energetic album.

But then, you know, Rubber Soul is probably, [the next breakthrough album] you know, because, you know, the next albums, I think, kind of continued in that line. But then they were getting more creative. They were, they were making their own songs, but they were still kind of sounding, you know, sounding quite similar. The love songs that they became so famous for in the early 60s. But then Rubber Soul represents another stage of their development where they're starting to get much more reflective.

They're starting to really think about life and art and music and, you know, they were at that point hanging out with people like Bob Dylan and starting to see music as something where you could really express yourself lyrically, poetically. So, they're getting beyond the kind of love songs that they had been famous for, you know, in the early stage of their career. So, this is like 1965. So, you can kind of see their development, this rapid development within the span of a couple of years. So, Rubber Soul. I originally grew up with the American version, which starts out with, I've Just Seen a Face. And then it goes into Norwegian Wood, You Won't See Me, Think for Yourself, The Word, Michelle. And then side two is It's Only Love, Girl, I'm Looking Through You,In My life, Wait and Run For Your Life. So, that was the album that I grew up familiar with as, you know, because I grew up in, in the USA. So, that was the album that that we had. But then there's the British album, which I discovered much later, which starts with Drive My Car. And that song had been put on to another album that was, that was released in the US. So, Drive My Car, Norwegian Wood, You Won't See Me. Nowhere Man, Think for Yourself, The Word, Michelle, What goes on? Girl, I'm Looking Through you, In My Life, Wait, If I Needed Someone and Run For Your Life. So, two slightly different albums. I really associated Rubber Soul with that song, I've Just Seen a Face. I just feel like Rubber Soul is not complete without that song. I think that was the better choice than Drive My Car, to be honest. So, I'm going to focus on the American version. And, hey, you know, the US was their biggest fan base. So, I think the albums that sold in the US were in a sense more important, at least in terms of their overall popularity than the original British albums.

So, that album came out in December 1965. And, you know, I think it represents, as I said, more, obviously, much greater maturity. They're telling stories now. Norwegian Wood is one of the iconic songs. But, You Won't See Me is a really interesting song too. And, there's a lot you can say about that song. And, they're starting to develop a sense of time. Time becomes very important. So, it's kind of, you can see it as, like, there's a lot of loss on this album. There's a sense of the fleeting, you know, they're starting to come out of their youthful periods. So, life is fleeting. Love is transient. You know, that kind of young love. Time marches on. All of these themes that are, you know, people can be deceptive. Oh, my God, my life, you know, in my life. So, run for your life. There's starting to think of the bigger picture of life. So, it's kind of represents a phase of awareness, a heightened awareness, growing awareness of the temporality of life, you know, from when you're a teenager and you kind of feel like you can live forever to, oh, God, things are going by so fast, getting much more reflective. But still within the idiom of, you know, popular music as they knew it.

But then, you know, 1966, Revolver was then another new, another breakthrough album. And much, much deeper than, than rubber soul, much more cynical, you know, starting with Tax Man, and then Eleanor Rigby, which I think I would argue was their first masterpiece. That was, that song is just, lyrically, it's musically, it's rather simple. But lyrically, it just took them to another level entirely.

And then, you know, some going back to kind of, but some more like mature love songs, like Here There and Everywhere. She Said, She Said, again, kind of communication, but there's some drug motifs there that you could talk about. Good Day Sunshine in the British version And Your Bird Can Sing, which is a lovely, a lovely song. Dr. Robert, again, kind of referencing the drug culture they were now a part of. I Want to Tell You, Got to Get You into My Life. And then, of course, Tomorrow Never Knows, which was another kind of breakthrough in popular music, much more psychedelic than anything. And, you know, referencing religion, they were starting to get into kind of mysticism and starting to move towards, you know, more focused on religion.And on that, what's the deeper meaning of life? In other words, they're starting to get interesting. It's kind of, they're going to college now, you know. For guys who never went to college, who never had a higher education, so to speak, they're kind of, now they're going to college. They're studying, they're reading, they're learning, they're kind of getting much more philosophical. So that's, yeah, that's Revolver.

And then, of course, 1967, the great Sergeant Peppers. There's obviously, you know, Sergeant Peppers is still considered one of the greatest popular music albums ever made. It's often ranked as their greatest album. I'm not sure I agree, but that came out in June 1967. And it has the theme, kind of, they've disguised themselves as another band, kind of referencing an earlier age, maybe a Victorian era. They are, you know, experimenting with sounds and styles and, you know, continuing this experimentation that started with Revolver.

And getting more, more lyrical, somewhat more, yeah, more reflective and philosophical with, like A Day in the Life, more imaginative with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. But also, yeah, philosophical, mystical Within Without You. Now they're kind of thinking way forward to, you know, When I'm 64, so they're like projecting themselves way into the future.

And then there's just a lot of fun songs about kind of daily life. So it's like, how do we find the deeper meaning in our daily lives and in the places that we happen to be, you know, have grown up in or are living in kind of the life of the city or of a small town or going to the park or, you know, and most Beatles historians would argue that the two songs, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields kind of belong with this album, even though they were not on the album. So getting very whimsical and nostalgic about the place where they grew up. So it's kind of like they know they're leaving home. So like She’s Leaving Home. And the she could be them, you know, they're leaving home. They're never going to be liverpudlians again, you know, they're leaving. They're, they've gone out into the world. But they're still grounded. They're deeply grounded in their childhoods in the memories that they have of growing up there.

And not just that, but they then ground themselves even further in the history of popular music and popular culture and entertainment in their country. So, you know, Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, referencing a circus poster that goes back to maybe the late Victorian age. So, and the, the style of the music as well, they're referencing music, all music from the 1920s and, you know, they're referencing even earlier stuff, folk tunes that probably go back centuries. So they're kind of getting ready to depart, but they're deeply grounding themselves in the past. So it's like they're setting off on this much bigger journey, mystical kind of search, but anchoring themselves in, you know, who they are. And what culture that they came from, the people that they grew up with and so forth. So that's Sergeant Pepper.

And then, of course, they, they went even further with that, with the Magical Mystery Tour, which had, you know, some pretty cool songs like Fool on the Hill. Of course, I Am the Walrus, really, you know, it was Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane. I mean, some pretty amazing songs on there. But I think overall the album was, it was just too heavy-handed. They kind of, rather than giving a subtler message, they kind of put it front and center. Like, we're going on a magical mystery tour and, and look at us, you know, how clever we are. We're going on a bus. And, you know, it kind of parodied. It was like a parody of itself. And so it didn't quite work. Whereas Sergeant Pepper, people could kind of indulge in the project because they disguised themselves. They put on these costumes on the cover and they kind of turned themselves into something different. Whereas, you know, Magical Mystery Tour just didn't quite work as a concept.

So we're going to skip that one. And then, go on to, you know, let's skip over 1968. And we're going to skip over the White Album and, you know, like I said, that was, I mean, there were some great songs that came out from this period, but, but let's move on to what was their last and perhaps greatest album, which is, which is Abbey Road.

Why is it the greatest? Well, here's my theory of Abbey Road. You know, a lot of people who analyze this album will put it in the context of they were breaking up, but it was a happy album. They wanted to create something happy before they departed. And there's some truth to that. It was the final studio album, which George Martin produced. It did represent a collective effort. So they've kind of brought their bits and bobs of songs that they were working on. Here are some reasons why I think this was their best creation.

Conceptually, it holds together extremely well. It's the sequence of the songs, the themes that they, the musical themes within the songs are very coherent. And there's a classic element to the music. This is by far their most classical album. It's an album that has resonances with Bach and Mozart and Beethoven.

So they're digging even deeper into the wellspring of music. Paul found a poem written for a play in like 1600. So going way back in history, Golden Slumbers, which I think is really the keystone to understanding this album. It's that song. And this was my revelation with this album. I won't tell you what I was on, but I remember one day, just I guess listening or thinking about this album. And it just occurred to me that that's a song about death.

The golden slumbers is the slumber of death. That's it. And so it's, you know, smiles awake you when you rise. Sleep pretty darling. Do not cry. It's kind of like a laying down to death. It's the death of the Beatles. It's an acceptance. I will sing a lullaby. I think what is saying is we have to accept death. And we have to tell ourselves kind of the myth that we continue to live on after we die. We need to tell ourselves that myth. And that's what all religion tells us that our souls continue to live or that we're reborn.

But it's a myth. You die, you die. You're gone. And I think they kind of understood that. And that was deeply embedded into this album. They knew that after this album, the Beatles would be gone. There would be no more Beatles. They would live on as individuals, but the magic that they had woven together as four musicians would never exist again.

Would it be transcendent? Would it stand the test of time? You know, I'm sure that they were wondering, you know, how long are we, we were, we were this incredible band, but are we just a product of the 60s or will this last on? And what will we do as individuals.

So I think all that's woven into this album. And I liken this album to Dante. The first side is the Inferno. That's the hell. Maybe it's the hell that they were going through as they as they broke up. Terrible fights, fights over money, over artistry. They were probably going through a kind of a personal hell because, you know, they, they were very sad that this couldn't last. And I think they all, you know, they were, they had gone through so much together. So it was kind of like a divorce in a way. The band breaking up as they went on with their lives. And like a divorce, it was pretty messy. It was, there was a lot of anger and a lot of resentment and negative feelings and, you know, that really comes out on the first side of the album.

With like, you know, I Want You. She's so Heavy. Oh, Darling. I mean, there's a lot of screaming. There's a lot of, you know, emotions, a lot of pent up emotions and anger on this first side. Maxwell's Silver Hammer, you know, that's an interesting one was, is this, I don't think that that song can be taken literally. I think it has to be, I think this, the hammer is figurative. I think it's, it's a metaphor, you know, the hammer of justice, the hammer of freedom. It was, they're, they're smashing a relationship in order to gain their freedom, their artistic and personal freedom. They're breaking up what was the greatest band on earth in order to attain their own freedom and peace of mind. So, you know, I think if you analyze that song, it's all about smashing authority figures. It's kind of a cultural revolution. The aspect to it. I can even kind of see a cultural revolution poster in my mind of a, of a young revolutionary with a hammer trying to smash all the olds [in 1960s China]. And maybe that's what it's referencing. Just smashing, you know, teachers, old girlfriends or judges, the kind of people who are holding you back. So, I think it has to be taken figuratively. I don't think it's literally a story about a serial killer. And especially because it's told and sung in such a whimsical way. Obviously, it's not, this is not a dark, this is not a Peter Gabriel-like serial killer kind of song.

So, yeah, so the whole first side just has this, you know, there's, it's dark, it's, it's, it's earthy, it's fair, it's the inferno. Here come ol’ flat top, you know, it's Come Together, a song, which is about as creepy a song as you can get as bluesy and dark and, you know, from the earth, from the ground up. And Octopus's Garden thrown in there is kind of an underwater, underworld sort of adventure with caves and darkness and something primordial. And, you know, an octopus is kind of a fearful, fearsome creature, you know, you don't really want to, you know, be swimming and kind of come across an octopus all suddenly without warning. So, you know, it's, that's a dark, that's the dark side of the album. And, it represents kind of the winter of their discontent and their aggression and anger.

And then you turn the side over and it's, and you're, and it's the Paradise. Now they're ascending to heaven. So, the flip side is, you know, Here Comes the Sun, one of the most joyful popular songs ever made. It's, every winter, it's a song that you sing in March when the flowers start to bloom again after a long cold, lonely winter. So, that was George Harrison and that was his kind of sense of freedom and happiness that he was no longer a Beatle, he could go, he could find his own destiny now. He had so much to share that had been suppressed by the Beatles and now he was going to let it all out.

You know, then, You Never Give Me Your Money which is such a deep song, such a, it's a sad, but it's also about freedom about, you know, crossing bridges. And, you know, leaving a place that you know you'll never go back to and so you're sad about that, but you're now finding your freedom and you're kind of finding yourself, a self that had been lost.

And then the whole, the whole medley, of course, which is just a brilliant concoction of these old bits that they had kind of, you know, scraps of songs that they, that they had been working on that had never really jelled into full songs and they put them together in this medley. And somehow it worked. And so it ends the album with this, and it's very kind of dreamlike, it's, like I said, it's very heavenly, the Sun King, a lot of themes of sun and light and joy.

And, you know, then you, you kind of go back to these mundane characters, but they're very, you know, Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, kind of the people that you might see on the streets and Liverpool or in the clubs, but they're very iconic, very archetypal figures. And, and then She Came in Through the Bathroom Window. I mean, that song, I think you can only understand by knowing the anecdote about the Apple Scrufs and Paul and kind of the end of Apple Records, but you could also see it as kind of, I guess it's their relationship to their fans in general that their fans are just invading their private space and they're kind of sick of that. They're ready to move on. An then of course, Golden Slumbers, which I had explained is kind of, it's a poem ancient, not ancient, but, you know, several hundred years old poem, which I think was about death. And, kind of the myth, the mythology of rebirth that, you know, that we're told like a, a bedtime story. And then finally, The End, it's the end. And that's where they all come together for this jam session, which is quite amazing and really, and then of course, Paul's statement about the love you take is equal to the love you make. And what are you saying is, life is finite. We don't know what's going to happen after we die. We don't know what, of that we produce will be remembered or cherished. But at the end, it all equals out. What you take is equal to what you make. So, whatever you consume or enjoy ultimately is, it's going to be equal to what you produce in the world. If you're loved by people, it means that you loved them. You can't get anything for free. You have to put in as much as you get out.

So, it's an interesting way. It's a final message. And then there, of course, there's that the final final thing tacked on, which was just a kind of a whimsical mistake that they decided to keep, which was the little, the little bit Her Majesty, which I think it's such an unfinished little, I mean, it sounds almost like a jazz song from the 1920s. It's very kind of classic early, early 1920s popular song in its structure. And it could have been something much, much bigger and much more joyous, but they just kind of just tacked it on at the very, at the very end of the album as kind of a little surprise, very folksy little bit.

But, you know, all their songs can be played in so many different ways. But what I really, so there's the Heaven and the Hell motif, you know, the Dante's Inferno to the Paradise. And kind of ascending, I think in the, you know, they're ascending to the heavenly Pantheon. They'll always be known as this great band, seminal band. And they kind of, I think they recognize that the band would outlive them. They would go on as individuals, but nothing would ever be as important as the Beatles in their lives. Even though it was so short, so fleeting, it just passed by in like six, eight years, you know, and then they get there, they get to live the rest of their lives.

So, I think structurally and musically that album really came together. There are so many recurring motifs and themes. And I think in a way, it was kind of like their Ninth Symphony. You know, when you listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, it encapsulates pretty much everything that he was known for musically. And just takes it all to greater and greater heights. And it's about joy and about the beauty of humankind and about art and love.

And I think that that was the message of Abbey Road as well. It was kind of continuing on from just that, so love in a way is kind of the message that love is transcendent. You know, it started out with the childish, it starts out with the teenage love, which is kind of a lusty, lusty love, but kind of a zest for life. And then, and then they got more reflective over time and, and more imaginative and lyrical and transcendent, and then finally, but it's always cycling back to that message about love. And that kind of never, that never left, you know, so it's, so love was always the message that, in a way, very Christian, as opposed, that you have to, you have to love the world. You have to love the people in the world, even though they'll let you down, even though there will be nasty breakups, there will be wars, there will be death, there will be struggle. The only way for us to keep going on is to have just believe in the power of love, believe that there's a some kind of greater power, and, and that love is coursing through the universe. And that was kind of the deepest message, I think, that resonated through their music.

Surviving 2023: Looking Back on a Challenging Year

In 2023, the world experienced some terrible natural disasters and more horrible wars. On the other hand, China and the rest of the world were emerging from the worst years of the COVID pandemic. International travel was picking up again, and China’s doors were opening wider to international visitors. Colleagues, students and friends were now streaming back to China and spending more time in the country. For me, this was also a year of extensive travels within China (20 cities in 40 days). Some highlights of my year included the launching of my new book Rocking China, an extended visit to Beijing, and hosting a doc series on China’s Grand Canal. Mostly I will look back on 2023 as my year of reckoning as I struggled to survive and recover from a major assault on my life. At the age of 53 (54 now), I must now face my own mortality and better prepare for the inevitable.

For those of us living in China, 2023 began with a bang. After three years of striving to prevent the virus from spreading in the world’s most populous country, the government suddenly and unequivocally put an end to all restrictions and measures to stop the spread of COVID-19. This happened in mid-December of 2022. At the time, I was living in a house by Dianshan Lake, the largest lake in Kunshan, where I live and work on weekdays. My wife and daughter were in our apartment in downtown Shanghai. As soon as the measures were lifted, the virus struck the city and hit the rest of the country like a tsunami. Everybody I know in China came down with it over the next week or two. My wife was down with fever and other symptoms for a week or so while my daughter recovered more quickly. Not wanting to throw myself into this wave of illness, I chose to weather the viral storm in my lake house. I ended up sheltering there for nearly a month as the virus passed like wildfire through the population of China. I holidayed alone at the lake (at least I had my dog for company) and reemerged in early January, returning to Shanghai to be with my family and rejoining a post-viral society. Thus, I avoided the first big wave of the virus since China declared its war on COVID in early 2020.

Adding up that time along with the months that I spent alone in my lake house during the lockdown periods of 2022, I probably spent around four months sheltering there during that year. The year 2023 would be a year of reemerging and reintegrating with society and with campus life at DKU. Once it was clear that the virus was no longer actively passing through the community, I rejoined the social world of Shanghai.

Looking out on the new Phase II campus of Duke Kunshan University

At the same time, the campus of DKU was picking up speed and students and professors were returning from abroad to rejoin campus life. In July, Phase II of DKU opened and we stepped onto a much larger campus with a new library, community center, and sports center.

Having gotten through the worst phase of the virus’s spread, Chinese society was in recovery and people were enjoying the return to a somewhat more normal life without all the restrictions, testing, and lockdowns of the previous few years. Like the rest of the world, Chinese society had suffered in so many ways and the psychological and economic toll of the anti-viral measures of the previous three years were incalculable. Businesses large and small were affected and the city and country were facing an economic downturn. Everyone I know in China had family members who were seriously affected by the virus, and the sounds of ambulances careening through the city were heard for several weeks in early 2023. Yet 2023 also began with a tone of optimism that the worst of the pandemic years were coming to an end and normal life could begin again. Finally we could say goodbye to daily testing in neighborhood stations, to green, yellow and red QR codes, and to endless masking, not to mention the existential threat of being sent to a facility for COVID positive people.

Jud and me playing some songs at Ray’s bar in Shanghai

Over the years, I’ve been working on honing my skills as a musician. I play piano and guitar and sing, and prior to the onset of the lockdowns in 2022 I was fronting a rock n roll cover band composed of other foreign expats, and we were getting some gigs at local bars in Shanghai. Then the lockdowns began and most of our band members escaped China and have yet to return. In 2022, while sheltering in solitude in my lake house in Kunshan, I spent a lot of time working on songs. I developed some daily habits for memorizing song lyrics and worked on them on guitar and piano. After the lockdowns ended in mid-2022, it was time to go back into society and share the fruits of my labor with others. Jud and I, the two remaining members of our band, had been playing in bars and clubs as a guitar duo. We continued to do so in 2023, and we joined a group of merrymakers who ran a nighttime jam session and open mic night every Tuesday and Sunday at different venues in the city.

On a tour of Shanghai’s Former French Concession with my students in early 2023

From January to March, I taught my Shanghai History course at DKU. It was refreshing to have the international students, most of them at least, back on campus, and many international faculty were returning as well. After the previous year of constant disruptions and lockdowns, not to mention the absence of most international students and many faculty, the campus was thriving again.

Filming the Grand Canal doc in Hangzhou, one of 20 cities we visited in 40 days or more. This is the famed Gongcheng Bridge, considered the entranceway to Hangzhou along the Grand Canal.

In late March, I embarked on a long journey to document the story of the Grand Canal, which stretches from Hangzhou to Beijing (there are other sections, but this was the one we traveled on). I had signed on as host for a joint project between Jiangsu TV and National Geographic to produce a two-part series on the Grand Canal for television. With our intrepid director Richard Hughes and a crew of producers and camera and sound people, we traveled to around twenty cities in the span of forty days, following the Canal southward from Yangzhou to Ningbo and then northward from Yangzhou to Beijing. At nearly every town and city we stopped at, I met interesting people who became part of the film as they told their own stories about the Canal and their connections to it. These included fisherfolk, barge captains, artists, designers, hotel owners, landscapers, scientists, and a famous influencer among others. We ended the journey on May 1 in Beijing, and I remained there for another week over the May Day holiday.

In 2022, testing positive would have struck fear in the hearts of anybody in China, since it meant being sent to a facility for recovery. In 2023, it was as routine as catching the flu.

Upon returning to Kunshan, I immediately came down with the dreaded virus, and spent three days with fever in bed. After a week or so, testing negative again, I rejoined my family in Shanghai. The long summer was beginning to unfold.

A flyer for my Beijing book talk made by DJ BO

In late May, my new book Rocking China came out in publication. I was invited by old friend DJ BO to join him for a book talk in Beijing. Though my mother-in-law warned me not to go, having just recovered from my recent bout with COVID, I travelled once again to the national capital where I gave a book talk to a small yet highly engaged audience. My plan was to stay in Beijing for three days, then fly back to Shanghai. What’s that they say about mice and men?

On the third night of my stay, I was hanging out with a colleague and some of his friends in one of my favorite live music bars in Beijing. Some of them were musicians and they were playing acoustic guitars and singing songs on the small stage of the bar. After they finished, I was called up to the stage, borrowed a guitar, and sang a few songs with my colleague B--, and a few more on my own. My heart was flying, but I attributed that to nervousness. Not that I had any reason to be nervous, I’d been performing songs to crowds large and small for a while now. When I finished my set and walked off stage, I was suddenly hit with sharp pains in my stomach, upper back, shoulders, and arms. At this point, alarm bells should have been ringing in my brain, but I attributed it to having eaten something foul as well as fatigue from not having played that vigorously in a while. Amazing how the brain rationalizes just about anything.

Despite my colleague B—offering to take me to a hospital, I told him I’d go back to the hotel and rest and see if my body calmed down. It didn’t, and I found myself tossing and turning a while and then realizing I had to get myself to a hospital and quick. Long story short, after arriving at the wrong hospital, I was taken by ambulance to the right one. The diagnosis was crystal clear: acute myocardial infarction.

B—arrived at the hospital along with another friend and colleague J—and they helped me get through the preliminary paperwork as I waited anxiously for the doctor to roll me into the operating theater. There, the doctors performed a routine procedure that saved my life. Known as an angiogram, this painful procedure involved running a thin tube up my artery from my arm to my heart. “The procedure was a great success” announced the doctor in flawless English. I was now the proud bearer of a stent in the spot where my coronary artery had been blocked.

They wheeled me into the ICU as I high-fived B—and J—who waited in the hall. My wife arrived later that evening. For the next two weeks my body fought to survive and recover from this vicious attack on my mortality. I was in one of the best hospitals in the country and under great care from the team of doctors and nurses who treated me. I was extremely fortunate to have ended up there.

The first week was all about survival. All my key bodily functions had gone on vacation, and I was struggling just to breathe. I found it extremely difficult to eat and sleep. I was forced to lie down for several days and could barely move. Yet gradually, and through tremendous will power and effort, I began to recover and eventually was able to sit up and eat some food. The second week in the hospital went more easily and I found myself recovering by degree of magnitude each day. By the end of my hospital stay, I was eager to be released back into the world.

Since then, I’ve been on daily medications. The first two months of recovery were a bit touch and go, and I found it easy to fall ill if I overtaxed myself. But the past three months have been better, and I feel my health and energy steadily rising. I’ve been seeing a cardiologist in Shanghai, and signs of recovery are looking good. Still, since this terrible episode happened, I’ve had a feeling that a Damocles sword is hanging over my head and not letting me forget my mortality.

Movers shelving books in my new apartment in Kunshan in August 2023

July and August were mostly spent moving. We decided to move to an apartment, a townhouse really, located close to our daughter’s new school, Shanghai American School. At the same time, I had to move out of my cherished house by the lake and find an apartment much closer to the DKU campus. I ended up moving back to the same building in Kunshan that I left in 2022, where I’d lived the past seven years. After living in solitude by the lake, nearly an hour’s drive from campus, I was very happy to be back “home” in another apartment in this building and neighborhood, and to be a ten-minute car ride from campus again. Naturally, I missed the lake, but I would return to it now and then to continue a documentary project with students filming the people who continued to live in an old water village by the lake, which was slated for immanent demolition. Mostly I was happy to be reintegrating into campus life again after nearly a year of lockdown-enhanced solitude on the lakeshore.

Over the fall of 2023, as I continued my journey of recovery, I became steadily more involved in campus life. In addition to the usual advising, I was mentoring several students engaged in various stages of their Signature Work projects. As the advisor to the Jazz Club, I started a blues workshop, which continued off and on to the end of the semester. Along with the student president of the club, I started an open mic night on campus in our Student Performance Cafe, the first of its kind. These events gained some traction over the fall and we will continue them in spring.

Posing with students in the cast, crew and band after the performance of the musical play Now Here This in the DKU Student Performance Center, Dec 2023

Meanwhile, some students convinced me to join in a musical performance on campus. The Musical Club was staging a performance and they needed a guitar player for the band. I didn’t have much time to learn the songs, which are of course much more complicated to play and perform than typical pop/rock songs. Somehow, it all came together for the two shows, even though I wish I’d had another solid week to practice the songs. The two performances got their deserved applause from the audience of students and at least one administrator. I hope this is the beginning of a long trend on campus of live music and stage performances by our talented students.

The Grand Canal documentary series I hosted was broadcast in October on Jiangsu TV. We are still waiting for more news of its international release, but I was very happy with the production and grateful to have the opportunity to work with such a talented production team and the director Richard Hughes.

In mid-December, I traveled with my wife and daughter to California. Over the past two weeks we have been catching up with our relatives here, some of whom flew out from the East Coast to see us. Given my condition, we were happy to meet them “halfway” rather than having to fly all the way over to the East Coast. We also enjoyed a visit to our elder daughter’s campus, UC Santa Cruz, where she is in her second year.

All in all, it's been quite a challenging year for me and for the world. Let’s hope 2024 goes better for us all. Peace, love, and joy to the world and Merry Xmas from California!

My Guilty Pleasure Reading in 2023

It has become a custom of mine to end the year with a blog post (who writes blog posts anymore? Who reads them??) about the books I read over the past year. These aren’t books that I read for any purpose other than pure pleasure and personal enlightenment. Thus, “guilty pleasure reading.”

I suppose some of my choices do relate to my academic interests but not necessarily in any direct way. As a champion of liberal education, I believe that even we “mentat academics” ought to read widely, not just carry out targeted reading for specific academic objectives or keep up with the state of our field (which admittedly I am not very good at doing these days). Nevertheless, I do feel a twinge of guilt when I look back at some of these tomes and wonder if my time wouldn’t be better spent writing more books of my own (I did publish one book this year, so I suppose I earned some relief time from writing). Still, one ought to be allowed some grace time to read for pure pleasure, especially if one has gone through some very challenging times, as I did this past year. Thus, without further ado, here are my guilty pleasure reads for 2023.

Sci Fi / Fantasy Fiction

I have admitted in previous posts to being a sci fi and fantasy addict, particularly in my teenage years, when I was reading a great deal of fantasy and sci-fi by authors such as Piers Anthony, Michael Moorcock, and my favorite writer in that genre, Stanislaw Lem. I was also a fan of Isaac Asimov, but I confess that I never got round to reading his Foundation Trilogy, until this year. Like many others, it was the release of the Foundation series on Apple TV that spurred me to go back to the source. Anybody who reads Asimov’s Foundation series must marvel at the sheer immensity of his vision, which has influenced just about every space-faring fantasy series since then, including Star Trek, Star Wars, and so many others. Stanislaw Lem was obviously inspired by Asimov as well. The made-for-TV series, though entertaining (who can resist Lee Pace as the Emperor Day?) hardly does justice to the original vision of Asimov, preferring to indulge in stories of characters with paranormal powers. That said, the Mole, one of the most memorable characters in the original series, had such powers. Yet most of the original story is grounded in scientific possibilities. The premise for the Foundation series is that a mathematician and scientist named Hari Selden can predict the future of the galactic empire at the heart of the story, a future disliked by those in power, and for this he is banished to the outer realms of the galaxy to compile an encyclopedia. Yet he and the community he establishes on an outlying world are helping to minimize the downfall of the galactic civilization and prevent centuries of war. The pace of the story is fast, and it develops over hundreds of years, focusing on key characters (unlike the TV series, Selden dies early in the story) and on episodes known as “Selden Crises” when the fate of the galaxy hangs in the balance. This is a monster of a book series, and a must-read for any sci-fi fan. I’m glad I finally got around to reading it this past summer, and I found it to be quite the page turner. As for the TV show, I understand why they felt that they had to recraft it, as the book series would be near impossible to turn into engaging TV—or would it? Maybe someday a TV writer or filmmaker will do justice to the books.

Speaking of page turners, I finally polished off the Fire and Ice series that I started at the outset of the pandemic in 2020. Last year, I read books 2 and 3. This fall, I charged through books 4 and 5, hoping that Book 6 might be out soon. This is a hope shared with all fans of the series. C’mon J.R.R. Martin, you can do it! As usual, these books proved impossible to put down once I’d started them, and I devoured both like the wildfires that struck Canada this year (yes, it was another year of global disasters piling up on each other). As with many readers who began the journey after seeing the TV series known as Game of Thrones, part of me wished that I had read the books first. You can’t help seeing the TV characters in your mind, which I suppose is a testament to the power of the TV series and the choice of actors who performed the roles. Who can ever forget Peter Dinkler as Tyrion, hands down the most interesting lead character in the book and TV series? I must admit that I found Book 5 to be bewildering with its explosion of characters and stories, yet Martin has a knack of making them all hang together somehow. I have no idea how he will be able to resolve all the plot twists and developments of Book 5. And I can’t imagine how he would have the discipline not to add more characters and story lines to this immensely rich world he has conjured up in the five volumes. The book series is so much richer, deeper, and more rewarding than the TV series, which ended in a very disappointing way. The characters are so much more nuanced and interesting too. While Martin is inevitably compared to Tolkien, I see him more as the Stephen King of the fantasy world, churning out books that are so powerfully addictive they just suck you into their worlds until you pop out at the other end.

Obviously, I was in a fantasy groove over summer and fall. Basically, I was recovering from a terrible health crisis, and I needed some fantasy to help pull me through it. The same thing happened to me back in high school when I went through a death-defying period brought on by an accident and spent a few weeks in hospital. The power of reading to help heal body, soul, and mind is underestimated, I think. The next book was a happy accident. I bought Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree for my daughter, who is also a huge fan of fantasy fiction and TV. One of our enjoyments is to indulge in such TV series as Shadow and Bone, The Umbrella Academy, and others of that ilk, and yes, we also saw Foundation together. One day, intrigued by the bright orange cover, I picked up the book to see what it was about. Once I started it, I couldn’t stop reading. Written by a woman with a feminist perspective on fantasy fiction, the book focuses on strong female characters, who drive the entire story. The lead characters are warriors caught up in a global war involving dragons. In this world, the dragons are either evil, hell bent on dominating the world of human beings, or they are benevolent creatures working with humans to fight the evil dragons. There is an East-West alignment to this world, with the Western dragons being the evil ones—perhaps a metaphor for Western imperialism and capitalism and its baleful influence on the modern world. The Eastern dragons are closer to those of Chinese and Japanese mythology, and indeed the people of this part of the world bear strong cultural resemblances to East Asian societies. Meanwhile, the title of the book refers to a secret society of warrior priest-like women bound to a tree whose fruits give them superhuman powers. It all adds up to a delectable story at the heart of which blossoms a Sapphic romance. I will be keeping an eye on this author and would love to tackle the prequel to this book if I get a chance.

 Music

There are usually several books on my list focusing on music and musicians and this year was no exception. While I was in hospital this summer, I was deep diving into the catalog of the band Genesis. I grew up listening to this band by default, since they had become quite popular and their hit songs were always playing on the radio (I was a ‘70s-80s kid). Phil Collins was also a highlight of radio and TV, and was an ubiquitous presence. Then there was Peter Gabriel. I was a huge fan of his music throughout the 1980s. But I didn’t really investigate the earlier work of Genesis when Gabriel was the lead singer. For some reason I decided to do so while convalescing and needed a guide to their early work, so I downloaded Dave Thompson, Turn It On Again, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins & Genesis on Kindle. I was treated to whirlwind tour of the band’s formation and its various phases under Gabriel and later Collins. While Peter Gabriel was experimental and showy—he wrote long song-stories, and dressed up in funny costumes and masks while performing, as you can see if you watch Youtube videos of their early work—Phil Collins took the band in a more compact and soulful direction. At first there was some crossover between the two phases in the 1970s, but eventually Collins helped shape the band—which eventually was pared down to the trio with Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks—into a hit-making machine by the dawn of the 1980s. Gabriel was obviously meant for more of a solo career and had a brilliant one. Phil did both.

I’ve been a Tom Waits fan since the 1990s, when a friend introduced me to Swordfish Trombones. Like a bitter single malt Scotch, it was an acquired taste, but soon I was deep into his unique style of music-making, and I also picked up CDs of his albums Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years, as well as a few others. Alex Harvey, Song Noir: Tom Waits and the City of Los Angeles provides many insights into the formation of Waits’s unique songwriting style and persona. The book delves into his early work when he was struggling in Los Angeles to make it on the music scene with his revival of what he calls “old man’s music.” I’ve been incorporating a few Tom Waits songs into my own repertoire of guitar songs, and it’s always helpful to get a sense of where the artist came from and why he wrote and performed as he did.

My focus this past year has been on Bob Dylan. I decided to make a consistent effort to memorize Dylan songs, and now have around 30 of them under my belt. Mostly these are his older tunes from the 1960s and ‘70s, with a few later ones thrown in for good measure. I’m still trying to digest some of his later stuff, which wasn’t on my radar screen until recently. In addition to listening to Dylan-focused podcasts such as Is It Rolling, Bob and Pod Dylan, I’ve been on a Dylan reading kick as well. Recently I read Tim Riley, Hard Rain: A Dylan Commentary. I knew Tim Riley from his book on the Beatles, Tell Me Why, which I acquired back in high school. I liked his humorous style and admired his ability to write critically and insightfully about songs I’d been listening to since I could remember. He wasn’t afraid of poking fun at a band that the world has put on an Olympic pedestal. With Hard Rain, he does pretty much the same with Dylan’s work up to the 1990s. I’m now reading Richard Thomas, Why Bob Dylan Matters, which is a somewhat more academic analysis of Dylan’s work, connecting his songs to, among other things, ancient Greek and Roman literature. I find it convincing. After all, the man teaches a course on Dylan at Harvard. But if you want to get into Dylan’s mind, one of the best ways other than his songs is to read his own book, Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume I. As Thomas points out, the book is part truthful autobiography and part showmanship and bluster, but every page is bristling with insights into Dylan’s influences, musical and otherwise, and his unique ability to take the stuff around him and churn it into archetypes for songs.

Fiction

While I tend to read a lot of nonfiction, I always try to have at least one work of fiction in my hands at any given time. This year I found Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale in a local bookstore in Shanghai. It’s an autobiography of sorts, which is a fine counterpoint to his works of fiction such as Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. It starts out with a deep account of an epic journey he took with his mother to the home of his childhood, which turns into a journey of memory and family stories. He moves on to discuss his transformation from a budding journalist into a writer of fiction. Like Dylan’s book, you can see how Marquez takes the material of his own life story and the people surrounding him, mythologizes them and turns them into fiction. As for this book, like Dylan’s Chronicles, I’d say it rests comfortably in the interzone between the spheres of fiction and nonfiction as many fine writers’ memoirs do.

Few fiction writers have reached the status of James Joyce, the godfather of modernism, who did for fiction what Picasso did for painting in the 20th century. I confess that I haven’t read Ulysses—every attempt to do so has ended in failure—but this year I read Kari Maher, The Paris Bookseller, which focuses on the story of Sylvia Beach, the American expatriate in 1920s Paris whose book shop, Shakespeare and Co., became a lodestone for expatriate writers such Ezra Pound, James Joyces, Ernest Hemingway, and their books. She also took on the responsibility of publishing Ulysses at a time when the book was considered scandalous, especially in the USA, for its candid portrayal of everyday life in Dublin. While you don’t learn a great deal about the contents of this towering work of fiction, you do learn how it was published and all the struggles and ordeals that Sylvia Beach went through to help get it out into the world. It’s an intimate story about writers, publishers, and booksellers, couched in an overstory of a Sapphic romance (that makes two of them in one year).

The 1920s holds a special fascination for me, and my own research on Shanghai offers many parallels to what was going on in Paris, New York, and Berlin at the time. In fact, I used to teach a course on these cities focusing on the theme of nightlife. Later I developed a course on documenting cities. While searching for some materials on Berlin, I found this graphic novel, Jason Lutes, Berlin. I don’t read many graphic novels, but I found this one to be compelling, both in terms of the story and characters and their graphic treatment. The illustrations are astonishingly good. I was able to download the novel on Kindle and read it panel by panel. It tells of the high times but also the growing darkness of the period when Fascism and Nazism were on the rise is Germany and in Europe. I learned a great deal about the urban culture and the politics of 1920s Berlin and especially the plight of the working classes. And in the midst of it was yet another Sapphic romance (that makes three!).

I don’t do a good job of keeping up with the latest fiction, but somehow Charles Frazier, The Trackers popped onto my radar screen. I remember enjoying his book Cold Mountain, about a Civil War soldier, and so I decided to give his latest novel a read. It also takes place in the period before World War II, focusing on an artist in Depression Era America who is hired to paint a mural for the post office in a town in Wyoming. Last year, I read about the mural painter Thomas Hart Benton (again, connecting to my course on documenting city life) and this proved to be a good counterpoint to the Henry Adams book Tom and Jack. In this novel, the key relationship that emerges is between the young artist and a wealthy resident who befriends him and provides housing for him on his ranch. He gets tangled in a relationship with the man’s wife after she disappears with a valuable painting, and he is sent out to find her. I think Cold Mountain was a sharper novel, but this one has its merits, as it paints a panoramic landscape of American society in that era.

Sanmao, Stories of the Saharah, was another work of semi-autobiographical literature that I enjoyed this year. I first encountered the adventuresome writer Sanmao in Taiwan when I was studying Chinese there in the late 1980s. It was a pleasure to return to her work and read this excellent translation of her stories about living in the Sahara with her Spanish husband, and their encounters and relationships with the local people. It’s a book that sits on the crossroads between fiction, autobiography, and ethnography. Though she certain was not an expert in the people and cultures of the place they lived, she does portray them in a vivid way. I haven’t read through all the stories but the ones I did read are evocative and hilarious in their own way. How expatriates survive in hostile environments that local people have spent centuries or millennia accommodating to is an interesting subject, and her eye for details makes it even more worthwhile. Is this Chinese literature? It was originally written (and I originally read a story or two) in Chinese language, so I suppose it qualifies. Yet it takes a refreshingly worldly perspective.

Another writer I first encountered while in Taiwan in the 1980s was Thomas Pynchon. While traveling to Hong Kong and in Mainland China for the first time, I read his novel Gravity’s Rainbow. I later reread that book a few times (it takes a few readings to appreciate the book, I think), and later tackled his other works, such as Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, and Vineland. One book that eluded me was V. I attempted to start it a few times but couldn’t seem to get through the first chapter. This fall I determined to get through the book and succeeded in doing so. Like Gravity’s Rainbow, it’s a novel that could take a few reads to plumb its depths. I don’t find it as compelling as GR, which is an epic adventure story set in WWII and postwar Europe, with historical excursions to other parts of the world. V is set in 1950s America, with historical forays to Malta, Venice, South Africa, and a few other places. It’s a bit of a mystery novel, with the main conceit being that a man is pursuing a shadowy figure named V through time. The counterpart to Tyrone Slothrop in this novel is Benny Profane. I confess to not following the story in all its intricacy, but the literary quality of the novel is stunning, especially given that this was his first novel. Now there’s only one novel in the Pynchon oeuvre that I still need to tackle, his last novel Bleeding Edge. Perhaps next year.

This year I also dug into John Le Carre’s classic novels Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honorable Schoolboy. While far from the literary mysticism of Pynchon, Le Carre does share some qualities with Pynchon, including a penchant for convoluted mystery stories that range widely in time and place, carrying the reader around the world. And conspiracy looms in both the Pynchonian and Carrean worlds. Both writers explore the shadow worlds of governments and spies advancing different and conflicting ideological systems. Both involve picaresque, deeply flawed heroes (anti-heroes really) who deploy special and often hidden powers to crack the mysteries, including their sexual prowess. Honorable Schoolboy takes the reader into Hong Kong among other places. Apparently the author did his due diligence and comes up with a credible and convincing depiction of this part of the world. I had never read Le Carre before and I was surprised by the literary quality of his writing. I will certainly come back to him in the future.

Nonfiction and Philosophy

On the advice of a Russian colleague, I read Roger T. Ames, Human Becomings, a reinterpretation of the ancient Chinese works of philosophical and political thought that I’ve been teaching all these years. Ames retranslates many of the terms that we’ve come to take for granted in an attempt to remove some of the Christian influences on Chinese thought (the earliest translators and interpreters were Christian missionaries) and get at the heart of the original thinking behind these key concepts. I think I need to reread sections of this book, but it definitely gets you to rethink some of the core ideas of classical Chinese civilization.

On another note, I found Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization to be right up my alley. As a historian and scholar of nightlife and music, alcohol plays a big role in my research subject, and I think the author is on to something when he claims that alcohol has been a key aspect of human social development since prehistoric times. As somebody who has over-indulged in booze on many an occasion, and who has championed the role of nightlife in society, I am a longstanding member of the choir to which this book is preaching.

Now and Then I Miss You: Some Thoughts on the Latest and Final Beatles Song

As readers of my blog know, every now and then, I weigh in on some cultural phenomenon, often having to do with music. And as astute followers of my blog are also aware, I’m a big fan of Beatles music and have been since I was a wee lad. Like many boys born at the turn of the 1970s, my gateway drug into the Fab Four was the album (and film) Yellow Submarine, which I wore the grooves off at the age of five. By six, I’d graduated to Sgt. Pepper’s, and then quickly strode on to Abbey Road. The White Album followed on their heels. By the age of ten, Revolver was on heavy rotation, as was Rubber Soul. At twelve, I was going hard into Let it Be. But I was also listening to their earliest albums, such as Introducing the Beatles, Meet the Beatles, Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, Hard Day’s Night, Beatles Second Album, Beatles ‘65. Naturally, these were all the US versions of the albums. Later in high school I discovered and devoured the UK versions, With the Beatles, Beatles for Sale. By the end of high school, I had at least 20 Beatles discs in my album collection. As you can see from the photo, I still have them today.

As I delved into their discography, I came to know their individual personalities as well as their contributions to the songs. At the time, other than what was available on or inside the albums themselves, or films like Hard Day’s Night, there was very little visual material to go with the listening experience. Instead, one had to imagine them singing and playing the music. As with many boys who grow up with the four lads, they became like imaginary friends and boon companions. In times of trouble, they were there to keep me company and assuage my sorrows. They were the brothers I never had in real life. They never judged me, and they were always there with supportive and kind advice.

At the same time, I was keenly aware that the Beatles had broken up as a band around the time I was born in 1969. They had all gone their own ways and were making their own music, as post-Beatles individuals or with new bands like Wings. We had the McCartney album Ram, and I loved Ringo’s album Blast From Your Past, which came out when I was five. I didn’t have any John or George albums but was aware of their solo efforts, which were often on the radio. When John died in 1980, we all mourned his senseless death, and my sixth grade class held a vigil in his memory. I dreamed that the Beatles were getting in a Volkswagen Beetle and saying goodbye forever.

Fast forward to the 1990s, when I was a graduate student at Columbia University living in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It had been a while since I’d delved into Beatles music. In college, I became obsessed with classical music. In graduate school, I’d been listening to a lot of other music, including jazz, and getting into New York sounds like Lou Reed, Tom Waits, and the Rolling Stones (for me, Beatles are Boston, and Stones are New York City). Then, in 1995, the Anthology documentary series came out, along with an album of Beatles tunes that I’d never heard before, or never heard in the way they were playing them. I devoured both the series, which aired on TV, and the CDs, listening to them over and over. They were both a revelation. Suddenly, we had intimate access to the visual archive and storytelling of the Fab Four, and to their recording studio where we could hear them coming up with their songs. We were able to see and hear them in deeper, richer tones and in a new light. To top it off, they released two new Beatles songs, which nobody had ever heard before. I couldn’t have imagined this happening in my wildest dreams. “Free as a Bird” was the first to come out. It was accompanied by a cool video with clues to myriad Beatles songs in a Liverpuddlian landscape, a kind of Beatles dreamscape that paid homage to John Lennon. Then there was “Real Love.” With Lennon’s voice blended with the others, and with soaring harmonies and scintillating guitar solos by George, both songs sounded like the Beatles. For me there was no question that these were Beatles songs, even though we had to accept that John wasn’t there to complete them with the other three.

Since then, there have been various new releases of Beatles music in different guises and forms. And in 2021, we were thrilled by the Get Back documentary series by Peter Jackson, which once again brought us into the intimate arena of the Beatles as they struggled to make the album Let it Be and perform their last concert on the Apple building rooftop in London. We witnessed their efforts to create new music together and overcome their differences to create what would be the final and one of the best Beatles albums (despite the well acknowledged overproduction of the album by Phil Spector).

Now, in November 2023, another Beatles miracle has been performed. A third and final Beatles song has emerged from the recordings made by Lennon before his untimely death. This was supposed to be included with the Anthology series, but at the time, John’s voice couldn’t be separated from his piano work. Now, with the technology of AI and the innovations of Peter Jackson and his team, they can do so, and John’s voice comes out crystal clear in the recording. The remaining two Beatles, Paul and Ringo, worked along with Giles Martin, the son of George Martin who contributed so much to the Beatles oeuvre, to complete the song. It’s a true labor of love. Both men are now in their 80s, and they have long since lost two of the closest companions of their youth, the only other two men who knew what it was to be a Beatle. This song is a testament to that four-way friendship and collaboration that created some of the best popular music of all time.

Since it was released a week ago, the song “Now and Then” has stirred up a lot of discussion and debate on social media. I’ve been following posts on Facebook and have seen many videos on Youtube discussing the song and its back story, and I’ve formed my own opinions of the song as well. One of the questions that has emerged is, is this truly a Beatles song? With two of the members long since passed on, what makes it so? Another question people are asking is why they decided to leave out the “middle 8” part that John originally recorded, the part with the lines “use you and abuse you” in it? A third question is, regardless of whether this is really a Beatles song, is it a good one?

Personally, I’ve gone back and forth on all these questions. Of course, we must accept that this is officially a Beatles song as it has been released as such. And who can doubt the word of Sir Paul, or Ringo, or Giles son of George Martin, or the estates of John and George? Yet what makes a song a Beatles song? Why were we more ready to accept the earlier releases of “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” as Beatles songs, but more reticent to do so with “Now and Then”?

For one thing, back in the 1990s, three of the Beatles (or the Threetles as some like to call them) were still alive. A tripod stands up well on its own. Now, George is long gone (he passed in 2001), and only Paul and Ringo were left to finish the work they’d started in the 1990s. And we have some testimony that George thought the song was “rubbish.” Was it just the recording he was talking about, or was it the song itself? One can imagine that George wasn’t too pleased with the “heart on sleeve” lyrics that John had come up with for the song. Or was it the strange chord progressions and the movement from A minor to G major? I haven’t done any further research on this question of George’s response to the song, so I don’t know and certainly would be curious to learn more about his attitude toward the song. Nevertheless, he did some guitar work on behalf of the song before they scrapped it. But for me, one key thing that’s missing from the song, which was such a huge part of the first two songs, is a George guitar solo. Does that make is any less of a Beatles song? Perhaps not.

What about the missing “middle 8” part? Why did they remove it? Was it the lyrics? Or did the chord progression and melody just not fit in well with the rest of the song? Apparently, this was Paul’s decision. Nobody can doubt Paul’s musical genius, after all he wrote some of the most cherished songs in the history of popular music. Yet by removing this part, did they also remove some of the depth of the original song, with John singing “I don’t want to lose you”? It seems that John is crying out for love in this part, and that’s missing from the version they released last week.

If John is mourning a lost love, what is the true nature of this song? It got me thinking that this song could be a lament at the death of a loved one. Who would that be? Could it be John’s own mother Julia, who he wrote one of his best songs about on the White Album? That song also happens to be the longest single-note song that John ever sang (18 single notes in a row—thanks to the podcast Something About the Beatles for this insight!). What could be more painful than losing one’s own mother in a freak bus accident? Especially when she wasn’t a big part of his life to begin with, and maybe she would have become so if it hadn’t been for her sudden loss? Paul also lost his mother, who later came to him in a dream when the band was on the verge of breakup and famously told him to “let it be.” Many people have speculated that the death of their mothers brought the two lads closer together. Then in 1980, John was killed in an even more senseless and meaningless act of violence. To this day, no true Beatles fan has ever really gotten over that. Certain I haven’t.

Thus, the resurrection of John through AI is kind of a holy moment in the history of the Beatles and of pop music. His voice re-emerges clear as a bell to give us a final message. Paul, the apostle, is carrying that message forward, along with Ringo and the others. The message is a deep one about friendship, love, and loss. And we should all heed it carefully.

As I was deep diving into this song and its origins, I was also carrying on a big project of digitizing old videos and film in my own personal collection. My own near death last summer due to a health crisis that I may discuss another time made me realize that the most important aspect of life is one’s relationships with family and friends, in that order. I’ve been going through my own personal collection of photos and videos and sending out copies to friends and family this fall, as a way of reconnecting with old friends and remembering the times and the bonds that brought us together. As I was listening to the final resurrection of the Beatles, I was scanning slides and sending out photos to friends and reconnecting all the dots that brought us together and reminiscing on some of the good times we had. Somehow this converged with the project of reviving this old tune of John’s that became a Beatles song as the other three members of the band came together to complete it in their own way. As I sent out each photo, I could have added the words, “Now and then, I miss you.”

Revisiting the Summer of the Bands: July 2007, D22, and the Indie Rock Scene in Beijing

Punk on Wood promo flyer for D22 Beijing, July 2007

In the summer and fall of 2007, while living in Beijing, I spent a lot of time filming the rock club scene. This eventuated in a documentary film Down: Indie Rock in the PRC, co-produced with Jud Willmont in Shanghai. More recently I published a book based on my experiences documenting and filming the Chinese rock scene since those “golden years” called Rocking China: Rock Music Scenes in Beijing, Shanghai and Beyond. Lately I’ve given a few talks about my book and screened our rock doc, which is getting renewed interest since many of these bands have become quite famous in China, at least among people into indie rock music. The success of the TV show Summer of the Bands 乐队的夏天 has helped catalyze this rock renaissance in China.

I’ve also decided to go back into my video archive and publish some videos of the bands I filmed in the Chinese rock scene all those years ago. These are now historical documents of a time that many consider to be a golden period of rock music—and of art—in China.

On Tuesday, I’m giving a talk to a Shanghai audience organized by the RAS. The series is called “Stories of Things” and features speakers discussing objects of art or artifacts that help them to tell a story about Asian culture and society. Organized by Robert Martin, it’s been a fun series to be involved in, and so far I’ve already given two talks for the series. This time I’m using a poster or flyer from Beijing’s legendary club D22 featuring original artwork, which was used to promote a series of concerts dubbed “Punk on Wood”. This happened in July 2007. Four bands were asked to strip down to acoustic instruments and play their songs or cover songs they liked. I was there for two of the concerts, both featuring the band Joyside and lead singer Bian Yuan. The first was the entire Joyside band, and the second was an impromptu session featuring mainly covers, which happened when another band failed to show up for their concert. It was a great way to get to know the band Joyside and singer Bian Yuan in the intimate setting of the club. Not many people attended the concert, and the lower volume of the unplugged sessions made it easier for me to record the sound (usually the sound overwhelmed the mic on my camera). I put these videos up on youtube for people to enjoy and appreciate a crucial club and time period in the history of rock music in China.

 “Used to be Happy” cover by Joyside

“Russian Roulette” cover by Joyside

“Lonely Planet Boy” cover by Joyside

“Arms Around a Memory” cover by Joyside

“Disappointed in You” cover by Joyside

I also put up a couple songs by Carsick Cars, one of the leading indie rock bands in China, who performed at D22 in July 2007. And a video of the young band Hedgehog. Enjoy!

Gun 棍 by Carsick Cars

Noise Hit World by Hedgehog

熊猫 Panda by Carsick Cars

My New Book Rocking China Drops Today! And a Mixtape to Go With It

Just a brief note that my new book officially comes out today (May 23). Rocking China is an eyewitness account of the rock music scenes of Beijing, Shanghai and other places in China over the past twenty years or so. I started this project when I began to document the rock scene in Beijing in 2007. Over the years, I witnessed hundreds of rock performances in gritty “underground” clubs as well as open-air rock music festivals. I interviewed dozens of people connected to the development of rock music in China including musicians and bands, club owners, record label owners, promoters, festival organizers, and many others. This book is a distillation of these experiences and I hope it sheds further light on the creative enterprise known as rock music and how it has developed over the past generation or so in the world’s most populous country.

My friend DJ BO made a mixtape of songs to go with the book.

-Spotify playlist for mixtape

-QQ playlist for mixtape (some songs missing)

-Book publisher's site

Getting Back to our Lives in Shanghai and Environs

It’s been a while since I last posted an entry on this website. I guess I’ve been too busy catching up with my life since the stringent Covid policies ended in December and the Big Wave subsided in January. Since then, it’s been a whirlwind of activities. Despite the big losses of the past year, the energy and spirit of Shanghai has been returning, and the mood is jubilant. People want to enjoy life again, and the cafes, restaurants, shopping malls, cinemas, museums, parks, and bars that survived the previous year are full again.

While December and January were rather grim, and the sounds of ambulances frequent, the Big Wave subsided around mid-January. People came out of hiding or convalescence, and social gatherings started up again. I had been sheltering in my lake house in Kunshan for nearly a month, which makes a total of around four months I’ve spent alone in the lake environment over the past year. I was able to ride out the Big Wave and emerged just as everyone was recovering. Fortunately, I avoided obvious symptoms, and I still don’t know if I was exposed to the virus. Almost everyone I know experienced a few days of misery followed by a few more days of fatigue.

By mid-January, I was hanging out with family and friends again in the city, seeing movies in theaters, going to social events, dining in restaurants, and jamming with other musicians in bars and cafes in town. Life eased back into a state of normality that we hadn’t really felt or seen since before the pandemic started in 2020. The government ended the use of green codes, and there were no longer any barriers to accessing public spaces, nor daily testing regimes. All the testing stations in the city stood empty and silent, grim reminders of the ordeals of the previous year. While many people continued to wear masks, this was now optional and some of us chose to bear our faces to the elements. The Spring Festival holiday came and went, and everyone went back to school and to the work place.

Now, it seems that everyone here in China feels that the Covid crisis is basically over. The government has been easing entry restrictions and apparently just dropped testing for people entering the country. Ripping off the Zero Covid band-aid was an unpleasant experience for certain, yet I think most of us are relieved that life can get back to normal in China, and that this country can reopen itself to the world.

One place where we can feel this change dramatically is the DKU campus. Most international students are now back on campus for the first time in three years. Most faculty are back as well. The campus has really come back to life. No longer do we need worry that classes will have to go online, people will be barred from entering the campus, or activities will be cancelled at short notice. It’s a huge relief for all concerned.

Looking back on the past three years, and all the ordeals we went through, I can now take some time to assess the pandemic as I experienced it. While we went through some very uncomfortable times, I was truly fortunate in many ways. First, I was able to ride out the early phase of the pandemic in my parents’ home in Acton, Mass. While this was a challenging experience in many ways, especially for my two daughters, it was also a rewarding one. Not only did I get to spend quality time with my parents, but I also got to deep dive into the natural world that surrounded us.

I came out of that experience with a much deeper appreciation of the environment in which I spent my childhood years, and a richer attunement to nature. I was able to transfer this new perception to my environment in China upon my return in fall 2020. I think that my enhanced appreciation for the natural environment helped me get through the past year when I spent several months in relative isolation on the lake.

Our ability to continue working and teaching online also helped a great deal. DKU was incredibly fast-acting and supportive of our constantly shifting environment. While I tried my best to teach in person in a classroom whenever possible, we were fortunate to be able to do so online during the weeks and months when we couldn’t access the campus. This also helped me get through some difficult times.

Another outcome for me in the past year was getting into an art practice. I started painting in watercolors and drawing scenes from my surrounding environment during the lockdown period of March to June 2022. Since then, I’ve made hundreds of sketches and paintings. Although my skills are rudimentary, this has been another important way for me to connect to the world around me. My newfound passion for painting also led me to start up a new project documenting a local village that is experiencing its final days as a community. More on that project in future posts, but for now I’m keeping it under wraps.

Now, I’m looking forward to doing more traveling both in China and abroad. And to spending time with my family and friends in the USA later this summer. This has been the longest stint I’ve ever spent living in China. And what a memorable three years it has been.

Here are some paintings I made recently in Shanghai and on the Lake.

Saying Goodbye to 2022 and to Zero Covid: Another Challenging Year Behind Us, and a Promising New Year Ahead

As I write this post from my apartment in Shanghai, the city is undergoing its most intense encounter with COVID since the virus started plaguing the world in early 2020. For reasons we can try to guess at but will likely never truly understand, the government of China decided quite suddenly to end its “Zero Covid” campaign earlier in December. Since then, a “tsunami” of Covid infections has hit the populations of China’s biggest cities. Even small town and village life has been affected, at least in the area I live in neighboring Kunshan.

Among people I know in China, which includes family, friends, colleagues, students, and many others in my life, the initial reaction to the end of “Zero Covid” was one of relief. Having been through a challenging year of lockdowns, restrictions, obstructions, daily tests, QR codes, travel codes, school entry codes, and so forth, we were all ready to move on with our lives. If the price of entry into a more normal state of being was catching the virus, it seems that most people were willing to pay that price.

Over the month of December, almost everyone I know in China caught the virus. Some had a mild reaction to it, while others suffered through several days of fevers, chills, body aches, and other symptoms associated with the virus. Some recovered quickly, while others had persistent coughs and fatigue. It didn’t help that the years of masking and social distancing had probably weakened everyone’s immune systems. Yet I don’t know of anybody in my circles who had to have emergency health care treatment.

While catching Covid was a very scary proposition during the early months of the outbreak back in 2020, over the past year that fear diminished. It seems that the greatest worry for people in China in 2022 was of being sent to a “quarantine camp” or special facility, which was the policy for those who tested positive up until last December. Once that policy ended, I think people were far less concerned about testing positive. In fact, it quickly became a source of amusement and humor with endless references in social media to 小阳 “little positives” a synonym in Chinese with 小羊 “little lambs”.

This doesn’t mean that people aren’t taking precautions. Most people still wear masks outdoors, even though they aren’t mandated anymore. I’ve even seen my neighbors in Kunshan wearing masks inside their own homes. I don’t know if they are being extra cautious and/or if someone in the home caught the virus. I live in a remote area of Kunshan, a relatively rural area of farmlands and fields, and even there, people are acting very cautious. Thus, it would be misleading to state that people in China have given up on protecting themselves from the virus. But the consequences of catching it are quite different to what they were up until a month ago.

In my own case, I decided to play it safe and stay in my home in Kunshan while the virus was raging in Shanghai. By mid-December both my wife and daughter, who live in Shanghai, had the virus, so for me going back to Shanghai would have meant getting exposed to it for certain. I ended up spending my birthday weekend and the following Christmas weekend alone in my house, and for three weeks I saw nobody outside of my immediate neighbors. By late December, my wife and daughter had recovered from the virus, though they still complained of fatigue and had persistent coughs. I decided to return to Shanghai for New Year’s weekend. I still played it safe and stayed home or took lone walks with my dog in and around our neighborhood. I’m trying to avoid this current wave, though I figure it’s only a matter of time before I too am exposed to the virus. Yet life goes on, and I can’t stay in my fortress of solitude forever.

While there has undoubtedly been a huge wave of viral infections since the change in policy was announced in early December, that wave already seems to be receding, at least in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Through most of December, both cities were like ghost towns, with residents either suffering from the virus and/or sheltering in their homes. In the past few days, I’ve heard and seen reports of cities coming back to life and people going out to dine and even to drink in local bars. It should be added that since the change in policy in December, there are no more restrictions on entering these places, so it’s a matter of preference now.

People whom I know in China are now waxing optimistic about the coming year. As soon as this wave diminishes, and as soon as “herd immunity” kicks in, people will be very happy to see their daily lives returning to normal without all the restrictions and the fears of lockdowns, green fences, quarantine camps and so forth. We are also very excited to have the opportunity to travel again both in China and abroad, and already a flood tide of people are leaving the country. Happily, the policy of quarantining incoming people upon their arrival to China is ending soon. On a sour note, other countries have laid on new policies and restrictions against people traveling from China, mainly asking for evidence of negative tests. In some cases, people from China are even banned from entering the country. This is all temporary though and I’m sure it won’t last long.

My prediction is that sometime after the Chinese New Year, people will have largely moved on, as they have already done in most other parts of the world. Yes, there will be casualties, as there were in enormous numbers even in such advanced countries as the USA. Yes, the virus will come and go, and some people will be reinfected. Yet over time, immunity levels will rise and Covid will indeed become something akin to a typical flu virus. I think this is what the government was banking on when they decided to end the “Zero Covid” campaign. Over time, we will have a much better understanding of the causes and consequences of the policy and its sudden ending. For now, I remain cautiously optimistic that our lives in China can be groovy once again.

My Good Reads in the “Zero Covid” Year of 2022

It has become a year-end tradition of mine to post about books I read over the previous year. And as any reader of my blogsite this past year knows, 2022 has been a challenging year for me and for all of us (all 1.4 billion of us) living in China. The “Zero Covid” policy of the government has been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it kept most of us Covid-free for the past three years. On the other hand, it meant dealing with a load of nuisances (such as daily testing), disruptions, restrictions, isolation, and lockdowns, as well as the possibility of being sent to a quarantine camp.

So, on to the point of this post: Which books kept me company during all those months of solitude on the lakeside? Not academic reading mind you, but reading for pure pleasure, as well as for personal enlightenment? Then again, as a humanist with a broad spectrum of academic interests, most of my reading relates to my work. This year, my favorite reads fell into three basic categories. First, there were books about music. Second, art. Third, epic fantasy/sci-fi novels. In other words, typical fare. Here are some of my top reads in 2022.

I started the year with a spate of books on music scenes and rock bands. This might have had something to do with my own rock band forming and starting to perform in clubs in Shanghai. I shouldn’t say “my own band”, since a band is a collaboration that doesn’t belong to any one person, unless you happen to David Bowie or Prince or somebody special like that. Our band didn’t last long—it fell apart during the spring lockdown when most of the band members left China (and still haven’t returned). Anyhow, I was inspired by this experience to read about some of the bands and scenes that left the deepest impression on me since I was a child.

I began the year with a deep dive into the So-Cal Canyon scene of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. I’ve been fascinated with that scene for many years now and have seen several documentaries about it. Reading Hotel California by Barney Hoskyns brought me deeper into that world. While the book recounts the rise of America’s greatest country rock band, the Eagles, it puts their story into the context of the scene that developed around the Troubador and the folks who inspired a whole generation of musicians to pick up their guitars and write their own songs. Those musicians and bands who flocked to the Canyon scene included Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and many more. Even bands across the pond like Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, and Eric Clapton and Cream were influenced by that scene.

Speaking of Led Zeppelin, early in the year I chose the massive biography of the band by Bob Spitz as my boon winter companion. I’d enjoyed his book on the Beatles, and next to them, Zep was probably the most influential band of my childhood (ok, maybe the Who, but close). I relished the opportunity to delve into this band’s history and learn more about their magical recipe for making epic rock music. I wasn’t disappointed, though I must say you need to be a hardcore fan of the band to slog through this humongous tome. As is typical with band stories, the early years are the most interesting, when the band is forming and going through the experimental stage of figuring out what it is about. Then you follow the band through the cycles of concert tours and record albums. Things get repetitive after a while, but you learn how each album was crafted and what the inspirations were and how the band worked together to make their magic. You also learn what it took to take this band on the road, and the special role played by their manager in the process. I’d say the highlight for me was reading about how their fourth album, the one with “Stairway to Heaven”, came together.

 After I polished off that epic band biography, I moved on to the R.E.M. bio by Tony Fletcher, The Perfect Circle. It felt similar in some ways to the Zep bio, yet without the over-the-top antics of the band members, who are low key in comparison to the Zep lads. There’s the origin story, which takes place in Athens Georgia, followed by the crafting of a particular sound and style, the years of slogging away in small scenes, the rise to the top of the music scene, and then the efforts of an aging band to stay relevant in a music industry that favors the young. I came out of this read with a much greater appreciation for the rich and long-lasting musical legacy left by R.E.M. which was one of the more inspiring bands for me as a teenager in the 1980s.

Later in the summer, after participating in a mini-concert of Grateful Dead tunes for Jerry Garcia’s 80th birthday in Shanghai, I picked up the Dead bio So Many Roads by David Browne. This book takes an alternative approach, focusing on several key years in the history of the band. While it was an enlightening read, I confess that I didn’t get more than halfway through the book, mainly because I was interested more in the early years of the Dead and the crafting of their distinctive musical sound and style. As with many musician bio pics, the story of the rise of a band is more interesting than its slog through the middle years or the end of the band, though some endings are more spectacular than others (e.g. the Eagles).

Last spring, for the first time in my career, I taught a “mini-course” on songwriting to a group of talented students at DKU. In the process, I absorbed several books on songwriting. These included Jeff Tweedy’s How to Write One Song, which combines some humorous observations and anecdotes with some practical advice on crafting song lyrics. Then there was Mary Gauthier’s Saved by a Song, a more serious and semi-autobiographical book about songwriting that encourages us to dig deep into the traumas that make us want to write songs. While teaching the course on songwriting, I focused on some Burt Bacharach songs, and I ended up reading his autobiography, Anyone Who Had a Heart. I was surprised at how enjoyable this was and came out with a greater appreciation for the craft of the professional songwriter, who writes songs that others will perform. I also read Beeswing by the folk-rock artist Richard Thompson, more of an autobiography than a how-to book on songwriting, though the author provides many insights into his own creative process as well as the folk scene in which he was a part during and after his stint with Fairport Convention.

In addition to forming a rock band, this past year I rediscovered my childhood love for making art. While spending my “hundred days of solitude” in the lake house during the spring lockdown event, I got into watercolor painting and drawing. I found myself diving into countless youtube how-to videos and reading books about painting and drawing techniques. Most of these books I was able to download and read for free through Kindle Unlimited. In addition, I rekindled my love for art through reading books about great artists. One was Matisse & The Joy of Drawing by Christopher Lloyd. I found this book in the Foreign Languages Bookstore in Shanghai. It’s partly a biography of the artist, but also a tribute to his skills as a draftsman, not just a painter. And it shows how drawing was so essential to his art throughout his career, even though he was largely self-trained. I found this inspiring as I threw myself into painting and drawing for the first time in decades.

Another art-related book that proved inspiring was Tom and Jack by Henry Adams. This is the story of the complex relationship that unfolded between two great artists of the twentieth century, Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock. The author argues that Benton was critical to the development of Pollock’s art, even though he forsook his mentor in later years. I’d taken an interest in Benton’s mural work while teaching a Media Arts course last spring on depictions of urban life. My dad recommended the book, which indeed turned out to be a great read on how visual artists draw from great traditions and add their own experiences and creative powers to push the boundaries of modern art, much as musicians do in the world of modern music. It gave me a much deeper appreciation of Pollock’s work as well.

While much of my fall reading was taken up preparing to teach a course I hadn’t taught before on Medieval China, I continued to indulge in reading pleasures with novels consumed late at night (I often wake up in the middle of the night and read for an hour or two before falling asleep again). One book on my reading list was Neal Stephenson’s latest novel Terminal Shock. I’ve read most of Stephenson’s novels and this one promised to face the future and current problem of global warming/climate change and propose a possible solution. As usual it was filled with technical details and very minute blow-by-blow action scenes, and the characters were compelling and wide-ranging. As for the proposed solution and whether it succeeds, I’ll leave it to the reader to learn about it on their own, but Stephenson regards it from every possible angle from the perspective of global politics as the world confronts rising ocean levels. Let’s just say that the Dutch figure into the story in a big way, as does a Texan billionaire, and a Canadian Indian martial artist.

In preparation for my course on Medieval China, I attempted to read China’s greatest novel, The Romance of Three Kingdoms, in a relatively unabridged version in English. The story takes place after the fall of the mighty Han Dynasty circa 200 AD, when my course begins. It is an epic novel about wars and battles fought among the rivals as they play a Chinese version of “game of thrones”. Speaking of which, reading that novel inspired me to pick up the Game of Thrones series by George R. R. Martin, whose actual title is A Song of Fire and Ice. I finished the first book A Game of Thrones during the spring of 2020 when we first started sheltering from Covid. I’d started the second novel A Clash of Kings but got distracted by other things, and so this past November I decided to dive back into it. Not only did I rush through that novel, I went onto book 3, A Storm of Swords, and read it as if possessed.

Those of us who have watched the GoT series before reading the books probably can’t help but see the faces of the actors and recall the visual scenes of the series as we read about them. Yet after reading the books a while, I find that the characters achieve a richness, nuance, and complexity far beyond the TV series and that they take up their own life in my mind. As any fan can tell you, the books are so much richer and deeper than the TV show, especially when you consider all the historical tales that the characters tell each other. I also appreciate the important role that music and songs play in the books, as they did in the medieval era and in our modern age as well.

As for how the Game of Thrones series compares to the Chinese story of the Three Kingdoms, I’d say that there are enormous parallels yet also some key differences of course. The Game of Thrones was inspired by British and French history, yet there are some fundamental features of the medieval age of feudalism, whether in China or in Europe, and something in that age that inevitably appeals to readers in the modern age.

Two weeks ago, the government finally let go of the “Zero Covid” policy. Now, it seems all of China is testing positive for Covid, and there’s a lack of medications and hospitals are overrun with feverish patients. Go figure. Not that I know any of this except from hearsay. I’ve been sheltering in my lake house on Dianshan Lake in Kunshan for the past two weeks ever since news of the rapid spread of Covid began to reach my eyes and ears. I’m used to the solitude by now. I’d estimate that I’ve spent nearly six months alone in and around my lake house this past year, mostly because of the Zero Covid policy, but now because it has finally ended. One key thing missing from Game of Thrones, at least the books I’ve read so far, is the plague. At least that’s one feature of medieval life that we can still enjoy in our contemporary world.

Keeping it Real in these Unreal Times: Music, Scenes and Social Life in Shanghai

 Last month, at the end of the October National Week holiday, having experienced a whirlwind week of museums, social pleasures and live music, I posted a piece about how life was returning to “normal” in Shanghai. Despite my obvious use of scare quotes, the post, or at least the title, was met with a great deal of skepticism and snickering by my online friends. It even got a comment by a reader (at least he read the title) that I was “making of fool” of myself with such posts. This is because the city was once again showing signs of lockdowns and restrictions, and the global media, ever eager to see the bad side of China, was publishing articles about it. Far from me, a long-term resident of Shanghai for over 20 years, to contradict anything that the global media publishes about Shanghai or China. Yet, I think these news reports were exaggerating the case. Despite some sporadic and highly localized lockdowns, and plenty of restrictions, Shanghai continues to move on a vector towards opening and relaxing its grip on city life in the face of the pandemic.

What happened, as far as I can tell, was that the travels encouraged by the holiday week had sparked some cases of the virus, and the government was once again on a cleanup mission as mandated by the State. There were more lockdowns, but they were limited to neighborhoods and establishments, mostly on the outskirts of the city. With the regimen of near daily testing in place, and the efforts by officers of the government to follow up on all cases and quarantine those who were close to active cases, the spread was mitigated, and we did not experience another mass lockdown as we did in spring.

I travel back and forth regularly between Kunshan and Shanghai. For much of October I had to remain in Kunshan, since our university had a very strict policy about traveling, even to Shanghai, and the situation was uncertain. I wasn’t forced to stay in Kunshan, but I wanted to be on campus to teach in a live classroom, not remotely on Zoom, so I stuck around and camped out in my lake house. By the end of October, the situation was more under control (Kunshan and Suzhou had also experienced limited cases), and I could travel more easily between Shanghai and Kunshan.

As I wrote previously, one of my barometers for gauging levels of openness and freedom in the city life is the live music scene. To be sure, live music in Shanghai has been impacted greatly by the lockdowns and anti-COVID policies of 2022. Many clubs in the city are struggling to survive, as are musicians. Things seemed to be on a vector towards openness but after the October holiday, live music venues once again were forced to shut their doors for a while, and musicians were out of work. This was true especially of the city’s jazz community, which I’ve been following for many years. It was also true of other live venues as well. I know that places like the Pearl, a variety restaurant, bar, and music hall, were really suffering.

Since the beginning of November, the live scene has once again been stirring. Last weekend, JZ Club was able to hold a performance for the first time in a while. Other venues have been posting shows as well. On Friday night at the crowded House of Blues and Jazz, I saw a performance by our dear old friend Zhou Chao, a guitarist from Shanghai who has been living in Yunnan for many years now. He and some friends gave a performance of acoustic and electric pieces that reminded me at times of Pat Metheny, but also had some Central Asian resonances. At one point in the concert a young woman joined him on Yang Qin, and the two musicians harmonized, though it was hard for this comparatively delicate instrument to compete with Zhou Chao’s electric guitar. Zhou Chao is ever a unique musician who forges his own sonic pathways. Some of the other luminaries of Shanghai’s live scene were there to witness this performance, including Greg Smith and Jasmine Chen.

Meanwhile, I continued to find places to jam with my sole remaining bandmate Jud and with other musicians on open mic nights and jam sessions. After Zhou Chao’s concert at HBJ, we cycled over to Magpie for a late-night jam session and ended up hanging out and playing with one of Shanghai’s great jazz drummers, Charlie Foldesh, who joined us for the “guilty pleasure” of performing REM’s song “Losing My Religion”. On Sunday night, we joined an international group of musicians including our singer friend Tammy for an acoustic jam session at I Love Shanghai, and I ended up playing a few songs with the extraordinary Kimchi, who free-styles song lyrics.

I can’t say that anything is truly “normal”, and perhaps we’ve forgotten what normal means anymore. But the social and cultural life of the city is picking up once again, and that’s a good sign. Moreover, the government seems to be taking a more targeted and refined approach to containing the virus, and that is highly preferable to the sawed-off shotgun approach of spring, which everyone still remembers all too well.

Shanghai Gets Back to “Normal”: Museums, Movies, and Musical Life in China’s Great Metropolis

Looking out over the Huangpu River and the Shanghai Bund from a Pudong-side cafe as I write this post.

It has now been over four months since the Big Lockdown in Shanghai was officially lifted on or around June 1st. In this post, I discuss how life has returned to “normal” since that time (note: nothing is truly normal since COVID began in 2019.) I focus especially on some of the live music scenes I’ve been participating in lately, which for me are a barometer for city life. The week-long holiday following the 73rd anniversary of the birth of the PRC on October 1 provided me the opportunity to spend a healthy chunk of time in the city and reconnect with people and scenes, including of course my own Shanghai family. Thankfully, the sauna-like heat and humidity of summer are long gone, and except for one sweltering day, we experienced some refreshing rain and mild and cool fall weather. Here are some highlights of the past week.

After teaching my last class of the week at Duke Kunshan University, I returned to Shanghai on Thursday evening, driving through the usual barrage of city traffic towards the Old Docks along the waterway known as the Bund. Arriving there around 7:30 pm, I made my way up to the rooftop where Kathleen’s restaurant is located, where my wife and I attended a party to welcome the new Head of School for Shanghai American School. Since our daughter graduated from the school in June, I don’t currently have ties with the school, except for my legacy as a Board member. It was on that basis I was invited by the other members of the Board to meet the new HoS. It turned out to be a big party with maybe 200 people in attendance, mostly parents of course. We enjoyed the evening overlooking the Bund and the Pudong nightscape, and we met a few other parents as well as catching up with some of the Board members and school admin folk with whom I worked on the SAS Board from 2016-1019.

The band backs a singer (Paul) on the stage of Chair. “I can’t get no….satisfaction!”

Later that night, I attended an event at the Chair, a live music club in the Tonglefang neighborhood, a converted factory district that features bars, restaurants, and clubs (it used to be home to the original Muse 1). That night, the club was opening its stage to “amateur” musicians and singers. Apparently, this was being promoted as an acoustic or unplugged music night, but the musicians were amped up as usual. The house band consists of a drummer, a keyboard player, and a bass player. They backed up a range of artists, including some talented musicians as well as quite a few singers. Some of the singers had their songs down while others relied on their phones to conjure up the lyrics. My bandmate Jud and I pay attention to this, since we’ve been striving to go “off book” in our playing. When it was our turn to mount the stage, we encountered some technical issues, namely that there wasn’t a cable to connect Jud’s acoustic guitar. Lesson learned: always pack a cable or two in your guitar case, as well as spare strings and a device for changing them at a moment’s notice. We played the Led Zep song “Hey Hey What Can I Do” which has become a staple of ours over the past few months. Then our singer Tammy, who recently joined up with us, sang “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by Fergie while I accompanied her on guitar.

Musicians and guests hanging outside of the new Magpie cafe, a late-night hangout on Xiangyang Road

After that event, we rode bikes over to the new Magpie, a small café bar on Xiangyang Road, which has become a nightlife hotspot over the past couple years. We’ve been going to the new Magpie quite a lot lately, and usually we end up on mikes with our guitars plugged into the amp, regaling the small and mostly Chinese crowd with a mixture of English and Mandarin pop-rock songs. The owner Jackie and his wife, who runs the café, seem to appreciate our act. Jackie is a good musician, and he often plays guitar and trumpet in his café. He runs a larger café on Kangding Road where we have also spent some time, but nowadays we seem to be gravitating more to this small venue. We were joined that night by Ginger, a well-known singer here in Shanghai who used to sing at the Cotton Club with Greg Smith and band.

On Friday evening, I went to the Xintiandi complex with my wife and daughter to see the Chinese holiday film, 万里归土 which could be translated as “The Long Road Home.” This was the first film we’d seen in theater since the lockdown began in March. Based in reality with some dramatic license, the film tells the story of an intrepid yet beleaguered group of Chinese foreign service officers in 2015, who go all out to get Chinese work crews out of a war-torn country in North Africa, which is in the throes of a revolution. The hero is an officer who uses his linguistic skills as well as a mixture of diplomacy, guile, and grit to get his people across the border and back to China as guns blaze and bombs blast across the inhospitable desert landscape. China is drawing on the Hollywood blockbuster thriller model for its own propaganda purposes, and while the film has a strong political message (unlike some other countries, ahem, China doesn’t interfere with domestic politics in other countries and used no weapons, China is a safe place in contrast to the developing world, etc.) it does seem to work on the dramatic level, even if the film focuses on its Chinese characters while treating most others as a backdrop (again, echoes of Hollywood there). There are a couple of sympathetic individuals from the war-torn country who help the Chinese, only to meet a bad fate at the hands of the revolutionaries. I shan’t spoil it any more in case anybody wants to see the film. My recommendation? Go see it, if only to learn how China is advancing its political propaganda efforts through the medium of film. I found myself appreciating the actor who plays the role of the hero, who goes through hell to get his people back to safety. I would want this dude to have my back.

After all that activity, I had a quiet Saturday, which I spent taking my daughter to her tennis lesson and cycling around the demolition ground of the Old Walled City surrounding the City God Temple (a sad fate indeed for such a precious historical sector of the city).

I stepped out into the live music scenes again on Sunday. That evening I met bandmate Jud, fellow guitar fiend Tom, and a special guest for a jam session at 521, a café restaurant off Suzhou River. We have been jamming there frequently for over a year now. After our warm-up, we headed over to another open mic session, this time at the I Love Shanghai bar on Xinzha Road. This old dive bar has a fraternity feel to it with graffiti art on the walls and a pool table. It has a small stage on one end of the bar, where they hold performances. I gave a film screening of my jazz film there a year ago. The open mic night is hosted by some Filipinos in the musical and F&B community and attended by a variety of musicians. Some of the musicians, such as Ray Dio, play their own original songs, while most others cover well-known pop-rock songs. There is some overlap with the scene we attended at the Chair. We got up on stage and played a small set, and later in the night, after they turned off the amps, we joined a group for an unplugged singalong.

On the stage of I Love Shanghai, we support a singer as we lose our religion

On Monday evening, the restaurant Cottons on Xinhua Road hosted a special live event, featuring Greg Smith on guitar accompanying two singers. The first was guitarist Dave Stone, an Aussie who has been a feature of Shanghai live scenes since he landed here for the Expo in 2010. Following Dave’s set, Greg was joined by Ginger, who gave a lovely vocal performance that included Lou Reed’s song “Satellite Love”, the John Prine tune “Angel from Montgomery” and many others. It was truly a special event, and well attended by a mixture of Chinese and foreign guests. While enjoying the performance I had the chance to catch up with an old mate or two and talk to some other internationals about the impact of the pandemic and the lockdowns on China and its precarious foreign communities. Needless to say, the lockdowns dealt a harsh blow to the foreign communities of Shanghai and elsewhere in China and catalyzed another mass exodus of foreign passport holders and international businesses out of China. Those who remain here hope for better times to come. Or perhaps like me, they are willing to forgive the lockdowns long as they never happen again.

The lockdown of spring, which I experienced in the neighboring town of Kunshan (see my previous posts), wasn’t as traumatic as it was for people in Shanghai. Many Shanghai-based folks I’ve talked to over the past month or so, whether Chinese or foreigners, seem to be suffering from a condition that people liken to PTSD. People are still scarred and recovering from that dark episode in Shanghai’s recent history. If music isn’t the cure for this ailment, it is certainly a palliative, and Greg, Dave, and Ginger’s performance had obvious healing powers for a community exhausted from the ordeals of the past few months.

Xu Bing’s Gravitational Arena, one of his artworks at the MAP

On Tuesday, I joined my wife and daughter for a tour of the new Pudong Art Museum or MAP. Located in a prime spot overlooking the Huangpu River, with huge windows looking out toward the Bund, the museum is a nice place to visit. The main event was the exhibition of the works of famed Chinese artist Xu Bing. Known especially for his experiments with Chinese characters, his work is stunning when seen in its full glory. In addition, the museum featured a special exhibition of the Tate Museum called “Op Art” which showcased experimental movements in 20th century optical arts by artists in the USA, UK, Europe and elsewhere. One of the highlights of our visit was having lunch on the rooftop restaurant, where we met Alessandro, an F&B entrepreneur who was attending to the needs of the guests. While on the pricey side, I recommend this restaurant with its view overlooking the river and the Bund, and the food is delissimo!

On Tuesday night, we attended yet another open mic session at I Love Shanghai. This time we were joined by musician friends Tom and Kyle, whom we met in August while performing at the Jerry Garcia birthday event in the club Real Shanghai. They had just returned from a music festival in Hangzhou and had some interesting stories to share. They performed a medley of Elliot Smith tunes and one of Tom’s original songs. We performed a couple of our more seasoned songs on stage, and after they turned off the amps around 11 pm, we joined the others for a rousing jam session, with Jud and I leading the way for a while with some party songs and medleys from our growing repertoire. We find that knowing songs well and having two guitars gives us an advantage in these situations, as does our experience playing unplugged in noisy cafes and bars over the past year or so.

Excavation site in the Guangfulin complex.

On Wednesday, I accompanied my wife and mother-in-law on a drive out to Songjiang on the outskirts of the Shanghai metropolitan area, where we visited the 广富林文化遗址，a complex of old-style Chinese buildings and temples surrounding the excavation site where artifacts of habitations from 6000 BC were found. The excavation site is replicated in a big underground space that also takes one on a journey through Chinese history. With its replicas of ancient old tombs, artifacts, and local businesses from Ming Dynasty, ending with the Bundscape of Shanghai, this space reminds me of the previous instantiation of the Shanghai History Museum in the Pearl Tower in Pudong. The complex was packed with vacationers from Shanghai and environs, and despite the masks, it did indeed seem for a moment that holiday life in China has returned to its normal frenzy.

Last night, my remaining bandmate and I ended up playing our guitars for quite a while under an outside canopy at Ray’s bar, a neighborhood bar on Changle Road, while the rain on the canopy provided a canasta for our songs. Owner Ray seems very happy to have us there, and we may end up playing a regular gig at this bar in future. One plus is that inside the bar has an electric piano, and I ended up playing the piano and singing a few songs to Jud’s guitar accompaniment, much to the delight of a very happy group of Italians who were celebrating a birthday. Thus, we are doing our part to reinject some merriment into the city’s musical nightscape and give our international residents more reasons to stay here. Or at least we hope so.

Post-Lockdown Summer: Reflections on the Lockdown Months in Kunshan and Shanghai, and on Making a Space for Art in my Life

It’s been hot, hot, hot and incredibly humid these past two months. Like the rest of the world, we seem to be experiencing the impact of global warming, and Shanghai has broken records for heat waves, as have many other parts of the globe. I’m glad that this week the temperature will be dropping, and soon the gentle months will usher in fun times at the lake, and I’ll be able to finally make use of my backyard and BBQ that I spent the past few months setting up.

When the Great Shanghai Lockdown began in April, nobody knew that it would last for another two months. Finally on June 1, the Shanghai government announced that people could once again roam freely in the city. Of course, there were spots here and there where that wasn’t the case, and for some, the lockdown persisted. Yet overall, the trend has been a gradual relaxation of strict lockdown policies and a return to normal life in the city.

As I relate in previous posts, I was in Kunshan, not Shanghai, during the lockdown months. As soon as things began to return to normal, which for us was earlier in May, I got busy with the Big Move, moving all my belongings over to the house I’m renting now on the edge of Dianshan Lake. By late June, I was able to return to Shanghai and reunite with my family after nearly three months. Since then, I’ve been driving back and forth between Shanghai and Kunshan as usual, spending weekdays by the lake and weekends in the big city.

Sunset at Fishery Cove. I’ve been trying out a style inspired by some late 19th century French landscape painters (and a crazy Dutchman).

As I mentioned in a previous post, one thing that came out of the lockdown months for me is that I rediscovered the joy of making art. I’ve taken up watercolor painting and drawing, and I set up an art studio in my lakehouse. It’s become a kind of obsession—sometimes I even get up in the middle of the night to paint. I’ve been devouring books and videos on art over the past two months, to the detriment of all the other books I need to read and review for my professional life. I can’t say exactly what prompted this art spree after so many years of neglect but I think the environment of the lake and the local farms and villages is very inspiring. I’m hoping I’ll have time to continue this obsession now that the new school semester is beginning again.

Looking back on my life, I regret that I didn’t keep up an art practice, much as I regret not having played piano for twenty years (though I did pick up guitar and I’m happy about that). It’s kind of painful to restart an art practice with all the skills I had when I was 12 or 13 (around the last time I took art classes and was drawing regularly). But I have to say it’s been quite a revelation to get back into it. For one thing, it’s changed my perceptions of the world, and I see things differently now. For another, practicing art gives me a deeper understanding and appreciation of the great artists whom I revere, from Van Gogh to Lautrec to Matisse to Jackson Pollock to more contemporary artists abroad and here in China I’ve followed over the years.

I highly recommend that everyone take up paint and brush, pen, or charcoal, and start a daily art practice. With minimal investment in materials and with some time commitment, you can reintegrate art into your life.

Crape Myrtles—one of the beautiful flowering trees in my new hood on the lake

The basic condition for post-lockdown is that everyone has to get tested every two days. I mean everyone, in both Shanghai and in Kunshan. Tens of millions (and the same thing is happening in other parts of China). All public venues require that you show your green QR health code with proof of testing within 48 hours to enter. Over time this policy has relaxed a bit, but it’s still largely enforced. To accommodate all the testing, they set up little testing stations on streets all over the city, with testers behind a glass window using armholes with gloves to manipulate the swabs as they swab people’s throats. In Shanghai they fill the testing vials with multiple swabs, and if one vial tests positive, everyone in that batch needs to get tested again. In Kunshan, they’re still using single swab vials for testing. At first, seeing the results of tests between Shanghai and Kunshan was a bit awkward, but over time they seem to have smoothed out some kinks in the system, and now the test results show up no matter where I am.

Hannah getting tested last June at our local neighborhood testing station in Shanghai

It’s a modest price to pay for returning the city to normal life. Now, nearly two months after they shut down the entire city, life is pretty much as it was prior to lockdown. Stores and venues are open, as are bars and restaurants. Even live music is making a comeback. Our favorite jamming venue, Magpie, has begun to allow musicians to perform on stage, and last night we jammed with several other musicians.

Even so, the impact of the two-month lockdown is still palpable. Many foreigners living in Shanghai chose to leave the city and the country during or after lockdown. You can still see foreigners trying to offload their belongings as they make plans to move abroad. Some have chosen Southeast Asian locations—Bangkok seems to be popular these days—while others have moved back to their homelands. The impact of this mass exodus is only beginning to be felt.

Moreover, many establishments that were thriving prior to lockdown have shut their doors. One sad loss for our neighborhood was the closing of our favorite bar and jam hangout, Hop Project, a craft brew bar on Dagu Road. Fortunately, we still have Brew Dog nearby (same company), and in another neighborhood, Brew Bear has proven friendly to our jams.

After several months out of the water, my daughter Hannah is taking her first swim lesson again. As I write this piece, I’m sitting in the café of the swimming pool as she gets back in the water with other kids and the swim coach giving them serious laps. My eldest daughter Sarah left China last month and is now in the USA, gearing up to begin college at UC Santa Cruz.

Performing the “Golden Nine” Grateful Dead songs at a live bar in Shanghai on Aug 5

Now I have two major “extracurriculars” in my life: art and music. Over the past few months of solitude, I’ve continued to learn new songs, mostly on guitar. I went on an REM spree, followed by a deep dive into Bob Dylan, while also picking up some other songs here and there. Now that bars and clubs are open again, we’re performing more and more. Recently, my bandmate JD and I crammed 9 Grateful Dead songs and performed them at a celebration of Jerry Garcia’s 80th birthday in Shanghai. Unfortunately, the band we brought together at the beginning of the year has dispersed across the globe in the wake of the Shanghai Lockdown, leaving only myself and my bandmate JD. Now that things are picking up again, we’ll be looking for some others to jam with and/or form a new band.

In terms of my “curriculars,” I do have a few articles and a book I’m working on, and a few other book projects on the back burner. For most of these projects I’ve already done significant research and it’s a matter of putting together all the materials I’ve collected into a coherent and integrated form. Same goes for a couple of doc film projects I’ve been working on over the years.

As with Spring and summer 2020, when I was “stuck” in my hometown of Acton Mass with my parents and daughters, the recent lockdown period gave me some quality down time and opened some new possibilities and perspectives for me. Most of all it made me want to slow down and savor the beauty of the natural world in which we live and to contemplate life and death and our place in the world. For one thing, I’ve come to appreciate and make time for more sunsets. A day when one sees a fine sunset is a day well spent.

Enjoying the afterglow during one of my daily sunset walks along the lakeside

While my friends and colleagues in Shanghai are still reeling from the two-month ordeal of being locked in their apartments with the existential threat of being sent to “quarantine camps”, I will remember April and May rather pleasantly as my “hundred days of solitude” when I was totally immobilized and immersed in my new home on the lake and was able to get in some serious “me time.”

Now my hectic life is returning, with frequent commutes to campus and to my home and family in Shanghai, and frenzied social activities on both sites. With the return of classes next week, I’ll be getting into work mode, and hopefully won’t get too burned out with all the commuting. Most of all, I’m looking forward to once again being in a real live classroom—my stage and my kingdom—and to having plenty of face time with our students. This above all else is what keeps me motivated to do what I do.

100 Days of Solitude: My Life in Kunshan During and After the Great Shanghai Lockdown

In early March, I left Shanghai, not knowing it would take 100 or more days to return to my family there, even though I was living just an hour’s drive away. My second home in Kunshan, where I live and work on the weekdays, became a fortress of solitude as both cities locked down for an unspecified length of time. As the numbers of people testing positive rose dramatically in April, Shanghai’s lockdown was lengthened from an initial few days to two months or longer in some places. Kunshan faced a milder lockdown, which last from the beginning of April til early May. Even so, it took a few more weeks for folks in Kunshan to get back to their normal lives and enjoy full mobility, at least within the city itself. Only recently did Shanghai open up and only a few days ago did Kunshan finally allow people from Shanghai to return there without a long 7+7 quarantine phase. Last Monday, June 20, I finally drove back to Shanghai to reunite with my family. Since then I’ve been getting reacquainted with the city in its current post-lockdown phase of re-opening.

I’ve already written two blogs about my experiences in Kunshan under our softer lockdown. I was able to move around in my community during the height of the lockdown, and in May I began to replenish and restock my dwindling supplies with a few trips to our bigger supermarkets in town. By late May, the campus of Duke Kunshan had re-opened, just in time for the graduation ceremony for our first class, the pioneering Class of 2022. I wasn’t able to make it to the ceremony, but I did get back onto campus the following week.

As the city of Kunshan opened up again, I was finally able to make the Big Move into my new home on Dianshan Lake. I’d moved over there in March, just in time to experience the Big Lockdown. But most of my belongings were still in my previous apartment, and almost all of my books were stored in my office, which I had turned into a book repository the previous year. Now I was able to consolidate all my stuff in my new home. It took two big moves with the assistance of a local moving company to do the job. I have a lot of stuff. More than I need. And you don’t really realize how much you have until you try to move it all.

Once I’d moved the stuff over to my new place, I then had to spend a lot of time unboxing, organizing and moving stuff around the new home. All of this took around three weeks of intensive labor to complete. But I’m glad I did it. Now all my books are once again organized and shelved in my new home, and I can access them anytime. One of the frustrations of the past couple years was the inability to have any control over campus access, since the campus would close now and then, so moving my books to my new home was a must.

This is a little aside, but I wanted to mention that I often have dreams about my book collection. In my dreams I’m always finding new places to store them. And they always connect to projects I’m working on, either ones I completed like my dissertation and first few books, or ones that are still hanging out there in space, waiting for me to attend to them. Now that I’m settling in in my new home, my fortress of solitude by the lake, I’m hoping to re-engage with some of those bigger projects.

I have to admit that since the semester ended in mid-May, my attention has scattered in multiple directions. Most of my energy was focused on the Big Move. For some strange reason, unbeknownst to me, I also became fascinated with drawing and painting. I made a whole series of paintings of local images, including flowers, trees, birds, cats, and especially a local abandoned fishery that I pass every day while walking along the lake. I also became entranced with a small village down the lake called Jin Village, and took a lot of photos, talked to folks there, and painted a few images. Given that my painting and drawing skills are not what they used to be, the results were mixed to say the least, but I’m hoping to continue to develop my rekindled interest in drawing and painting over the next few months and years.

This was one of many eccentricities that I adopted while living in solitude all those months. Another was to let my hair grow longer (didn’t have much choice there at least until late May) and to cultivate—if that’s the appropriate word—a rather unkempt beard. By the time I arrived in Shanghai, my friends knew me variously as the Caveman, Robinson Crusoe, the Homeless Dude, and the Unibomber. Needless to say, as soon as I re-entered the realm of civilization, i.e. returned to Shanghai, I went to our local hair salon for a long-awaited haircut and trimmed my beard way down to a cool summer look.

It’s funny how living in solitude for so many days and nights brought out the Bohemian in me. I’m sure I’m not alone in this tendency. I believe the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove lived alone in their huts, back in the North and South Dynasties Age (200-300s AD). One of them was known for going around his home naked. When neighbors complained, the local constabulary came to check him out. He opened the door nude and beckoned them inside. When they addressed the complaint, he replied, “Gentlemen, I believe that the whole universe is my home, and my house is my clothing, so what are you doing in my pants?” At which point they made a hasty departure.

No such complaints from my lakeside neighbors, I’m afraid, just a mild noise complaint about playing guitar and singing on my back porch at night. In fact I held two barbecue dinner parties on the back porch with some nice neighbors and with a few of my DKU colleagues. That was part of my vision for the place, and hopefully as things improve, there will be more to come. And maybe we’ll float glasses of wine down the local canal and compose spontaneous poems, as did the great sages of old.

Lockdown Lifting: Kunshan is Free Now, but Shanghai Still Shuttered

For nearly two months now, I’ve been immobilized in my new lakeside neighborhood in Kunshan (see my previous post). In line with Shanghai’s much harsher lockdown, the Kunshan lockdown began in March, solidified in April, and started loosening up in May. For the past two weeks I’ve been able to leave my compound and drive all the way to the center of Kunshan City, where I was able to replenish some of my dwindling supplies. Also, after being nearly empty for the past month, the shelves of our local neighborhood shops once again have a full array of items, albeit limited in scope. And packages are being delivered to my doorstep once more. I had a number of packages on hold that I’d order on Taobao several weeks ago. Normally items take a few days at most to reach your doorstep here in China, but everything was put on hold for the entire month of April and well into May. Now the delivery trucks are once again speeding through our neighborhood with boxes of goods. It feels like the end of a long bout of constipation.

The past few weeks have been quite an ordeal for everyone. In addition to the isolation and immobilization, there’s also been the great uncertainty of how long this lockdown would continue and also what would happen if the virus continues to spread. The thought of being sent to a quarantine camp is not a pleasant one to say the least.

On the other hand, compared to my friends and family stuck in their apartments in Shanghai, my lockdown experience has been a mild one. Every day, I go on long walks in our neighborhood with my dog. We average close to 10K of walking per day. I know all the best routes and the best stopping points. Naturally, the lakeside walks are the best, and now that they are strewn with purple and yellow flowers, they are glorious walks indeed.

One place I visit daily is a small grass and flower-covered hillock overlooking the small lake in our community. It’s private property, but the house is unoccupied and the gates are wide open. In addition to me and my dog, others go there daily to fish, although technically this isn’t allowed and the police cart comes by now and then to scatter the fishermen.

I enjoy sitting on the hillock looking out over the lake in its various moods and watching the birds. There are several white egrets that contest for territory, preferring to strut along the buoy-boundary fences in the water as they hunt for fish. A family of little grebes floats and dives in the lake. I also see fishing boats now and then. Today an older couple were pulling up nets in various spots around the lake. There are also boats for hourly rent, including colorful kayaks and canoes. I may try them out later in the season.

After a few minutes at the lakeside, I wander back home, tracing a circular route that takes me through the neighborhoods of our community. Sometimes I stop to identify trees and flowers. The loquats are bursting now with yellow fruits. There are oleanders with purple and white flowers. There are St. Johnswort flowers, all yellow with bristling stamens. Today I spotted a sweetgum.

The most ubiquitous are the camphor trees, which line all the roads. They provide excellent shade. They are also very messy trees in springtime. In March, they drop their purple drupes all over the roads. Then they shed their leaves, which turn yellow, red, purple and finally brown, and immediately they grow new leaves. Then their tiny little yellow flowers grow and disperse all over the streets. Meanwhile, the local ladies hired to sweep the streets are kept busy all spring.

Since the lockdown lifted earlier in May, people have visibly relaxed. Many people don’t even wear masks outdoors anymore, and the local shopkeepers aren’t wearing them either. I guess everyone feels much safer now that numbers in Kunshan have dropped back to zero and people are being tested no longer on a daily basis but at least every two or three days. It seems that our community has now cut down the testing to once every three days, though they never seem to be able to state a clear policy around the testing. Instead, it’s “wait until we’re informed (by the government)”. Everybody’s in the dark in one way or other.

Despite the lifting of travel restrictions within Kunshan, I’m still choosing to lay low and stay in and around my neighborhood. I’ve been on two car trips to the city center to resupply; both times I’ve visited the German superstore called Metro. Both times I found plenty of stuff, yet I was disappointed by their lack of imported items including coffee beans, Italian pasta, and tonic water. Still, I was able to restock my liquor cabinets, fill the fridge with beer, and stuff the freezer with cuts of chicken and beef.

The biggest change for me has been my ability to make bread. Until the lockdown began, I’d never baked a loaf in my life. But after all the bread disappeared off the shelves, the need arose. Fortunately, the local shop still carried plenty of yeast and flour. I started watching how-to videos on Youtube. I recommend watching a few of them to get different tips and learn different techniques. Now I bake a loaf of bread every week. I also make homemade pizzas and banana bread. The bread I make now is fresher and tastier than any of the store-bought bread you can buy in China, except perhaps the specialized breads in shops like Baker & Spice in Shanghai.

A couple weeks ago, while I was walking back home from the local shops, I was approached by a Frenchman who also lives in our community. He invited me to join him and an Englishman and their wives for dinner. We exchanged Wechats. Later, we all met for a long lunch. I also invited another foreigner who I’d seen a few times on the road, who was always friendly and said hello even at the height of the lockdown when we were all masking. It was drizzling that afternoon, and we found a covered pavilion to sit while we enjoyed a potluck lunch together with some wine, beer, and whiskey.

A few days later, I invited the group to join me for a BBQ dinner at my home. This was the first time I had a chance to use my new backyard grill. Fortunately, one member of the party turns out to be a veteran grill-master and showed me the ropes. We had a nice evening eating beef and chicken kebabs and home-made bread while chatting on my back porch. At one point I brought out my guitar. I hadn’t played songs for other people since the lockdown began, and since I’d been working on a whole new set-list of songs, I tried some of them out on the group. They seemed to appreciate the live show.

This is one thing I miss from the “normal days” of Shanghai prior to the lockdown, when we had a band going and were jamming and gigging all around town in local clubs and bars. Maybe we will be able to revive that scene. But since the lockdown in Shanghai is still ongoing and nobody knows for sure when and how things will return to normal again, everything is up in the air.

As the lockdowns in China progress, many foreigners have indicated their desire to leave the country, temporarily if not permanently. Some have already left for their home countries or for greener pastures. One of my old friends from Beijing moved down to Thailand recently, citing difficulties returning to China as the main reason. Some people predict another mass exodus of foreigners from China. Since 2020, the number of foreigners in China has already halved, and it may halve again according to some predictions.

I have no plans to leave the country any time soon. It’s still too expensive to fly back and forth to China, the process of returning here is complicated, and the quarantine time is very long. I would love to spend part of the summer back in the States visiting family and friends, regardless of the current situation, but I don’t think I can afford to do so right now. I’m hoping that traveling will ease up over the next year or so.

As for the overall impact of the lockdown on Shanghai, this remains to be seen. I am confident that the city will be able to spring back into a glorious existence. Yet this may take some time and a great deal of healing. We shall see. The next few weeks and months will be interesting indeed.

The Shanghai and Kunshan Lockdowns: The View from the Lakehouse

Last winter, I decided to move my residence in Kunshan. After living in the same place for nearly seven years, I felt I needed a change of scenery. Also, the neighborhood I was living in had been thoroughly transformed and urbanized over those years. Even though it boasts a wonderful park (Forest Park), it has become a noisy mess, with a new subway line being built along the main road (Qianjin Road), and constant construction of buildings in all directions. Moreover, my next-door neighbor decided without consulting or informing neighbors, as is the usual case here, to thoroughly renovate their apartment, which resulted in a great deal of banging, chiseling, hammering and various other noises and smells emanating daily from the walls and hall of my apartment, a place that I often use as my primary workspace. This was the decisive signal that it was time to move on.

Moving out was not an easy decision. Over the years, I’d made my apartment in Kunshan into a cozy home. I’d cleaned up and fixed out the balcony, which was a wonderful space overlooking the canopy of trees outside the fourth-floor apartment. I had spent much of the previous year fixing up the kitchen, which was now a fine place to cook, eat, and watch the birds flitting about the canopy of trees outside the windows. Recently I’d acquired an amiable flatmate, a colleague from DKU where I’ve been working and teaching for seven years now. Perhaps the finest point of the apartment is that it is a ten-minute drive to campus. At DKU, I was the pioneer settler of this apartment complex, which hosts thousands of residents in dozens of high-rise apartments. Over the years, as DKU expanded its faculty and staff base, dozens of other colleagues moved into this apartment complex and into the neighboring complexes, creating a vibrant community of DKUers.

Thus, it wasn’t easy to depart the apartment and the neighborhood. Nevertheless, I persisted in searching for a new place, and I targeted the lake district to the south. I wanted to find a bigger place, one where I could hold parties, host events, and even arrange sleepovers for friends and family coming out to the countryside from Shanghai, a kind of B&B if you will (call me Basil Fawlty). I envisioned a place with a back yard where I could cook up barbeques on a grill and sit on the back porch in the early evening with a beer in hand, strumming on my guitar in the light of the setting sun. I also envisioned a music room where I could play my instruments and invite my bandmates, students and others to practice or record music. 

Lo and behold, I found such a place, a house in a community off the biggest lake in the region, Dianshan Lake. I hadn’t spent much time in that region since joining DKU and moving to Kunshan. I’d been to some of the water-towns such as Zhouzhuang and Jinxi, which are quite attractive if touristy, but other than that I hadn’t had any reason to explore this area of Kunshan. After communicating with an agent, I was shown a home for a very reasonable rent, not much more than what I was already paying for my apartment. I looked at a few other places nearby, which were more expensive and not as charming. The clincher was that the home was fitted with a karaoke room, soundproofed, which made a perfect music room. Also, it was a two-minute walk to the lakeside. Those two factors sold me on the place. 

I started moving in at the end of winter. In March, I took a few carloads of stuff from my apartment and started settling into the new place. Then the lockdowns began. At first, I was stuck in the new neighborhood for two weeks because I had been to Shanghai and my travel code had a star on it. They wouldn’t let me drive or even walk out of the compound. As soon as I was free, I drove to campus to grab some books for my new course on Documenting City Life. I also went to the Metro shopping center to stock up on supplies of food and beverages, and I grabbed a bunch of stuff from my apartment, including my record collection, to bring to my new home. You never know when you’ll need to put on an album to comfort you in these times.

I had a hunch that things would close down further, since the situation in Shanghai was getting more intense over the month of March. People in Pudong were being asked to stay in their homes. “Asked” is a mild term for it. Puxi was next. By the end of the month, the city announced a five-day lockdown plan, with Pudong first and Puxi next. I couldn’t even get back to Shanghai, since all the highways were blocked. (All of this is well known and I also discuss it in a couple of podcast interviews I’ve done recently, so I won’t go into details.) Suffice it to say that the initial lockdown plan was extended indefinitely, and as of April 24, there is still no clear indication of when the people of Shanghai will be released from this total lockdown. My wife and daughters have been stuck inside our Shanghai apartment for 24 days now, as have millions of others. A few neighborhoods have been allowed some freedom, but in a very limited way, and for all practical purposes the city is still completely shut down.

Meanwhile, here in Kunshan, roads were being closed and roadblocks going up, more and more every day. Eventually we also settled into a lockdown, though a softer one than in Shanghai. People were forced to stay in their communities and could only go out of their residential areas occasionally to buy food. I was completely cut off from the northern and central districts of Kunshan where my campus, apartment, and the major food centers are located. It’s a good thing I’d prepared for such an outcome and had stocked my larder with food and drink supplies. Now, for the past month or more, I’ve basically been confined to my own neighborhood residence. For a while, we were still able to walk outside the residence and enjoy the beautiful lakeside walks that my new neighborhood affords. More recently, these perambulations have been strongly discouraged and more guards are posted on the main gates of our residential area to deter us from going out of them. The exterior entrances to the food and goods shops lining the main gates of our residence have also been shut, and you need to enter these establishments from the back doors inside the residence. 

For a while, it was getting hard to find fresh vegetables and fruits, let alone anything else. More recently, the fresh fruits and vegetables have returned to the local shelves, though at much higher prices than usual. Last week I paid around 75 RMB for a melon!

In many respects it’s been a soft and easy lockdown for me. I live in a large home now, with few neighbors. I have an entire backyard to myself, which I share only with the chattering birds and the buzzing bees. The residential area in which I live is very expansive, lined with large houses (mostly empty) and flowering trees, and has canals and a smaller lake. The month of April has been gorgeous, and I get to experience the flowering of various trees, bushes, and plants. I can take long walks with my dog on the tree-lined streets, soaking in the redolent aroma of the flowering plants and trees. I have even been able to head out to the lakeside for a few long walks. I can also cycle around the neighborhood.
Most of the residents here seem to be quite well educated. Mandarin Chinese seems to be the main language that I hear, although some people speak in the Shanghainese dialect. Judging from the license plates of cars parked in front of various residences, people are mainly either from Jiangsu Province or Shanghai. The occupancy rate for the homes here seems to be very low. I was told this is more of a weekend-holiday-summer retreat area, so I suspect in normal times people head here from the cities for weekend and summer fun. There are gazebos and pavilions lining the lakeside, where people can hold barbeques. There is a boat rental business at one of the gates, with canoes, kayaks and other boats for rent. I’ve seen a few kayakers on the smaller lake and I plan to try that out myself one of these days.

All in all it’s really paid off for me to move here. To be sure, the commute to campus is much longer, around 30-40 minutes in normal times. But that’s a moot point right now, since the campus is in a “closed loop system” and most of us aren’t allowed on campus even if we could travel there. Instead we are all teaching online again. I have mixed feelings about this. My current course lends itself well to online teaching since we do a lot of analysis and interpretation of artworks, photographs, films, and other visual records of urban life. Of course my plan to have the students conduct their own fieldwork was completely scuttled by the lockdown.

On the other hand, I’m glad to take a break from the constant grind of commuting for a while. Normally I drive to Shanghai every weekend, and also around the area of Kunshan and environs for various reasons. I haven’t even entered my car in over a month now.

Naturally, I’m looking forward to reuniting with my family and friends in Shanghai, and with colleagues and students in Kunshan as well. I suspect that this madness will end soon, perhaps in the next month or so. Meanwhile, I’m trying to take advantage of my solitude to enjoy and explore my new environs, and to catch up with some research projects that I can do from home. One of my big rationales for moving here in the first place was to have a “fortress of solitude” where I can conduct “deep work”, not unlike Carl Jung and his castle. Fate and the PRC government have now dictated that I have that solitude whether I like it or not.