HEAT 20 - Plain Vanilla Futures
HEAT 20, soon to give way to summer … but the final days of withering spring seem a very suitable time to celebrate the astringencies, the grain of salt, the melancholia of the overblown – all that coming down. I have travelled the globe with the globe-trotters – to Peru, Beijing, Berlin, Bangkok, to Xin Jiang Province, London, Spain - and where has it left me?
Not quite down south in the Sutherland Shire, where Andrew Stark’s stills tease out improbable flashbacks and hallucinations – the unadulterated reality of sun-drunk tribalism. Anthropologise / exoticise – point and click, frame and ponder.
Andrew Stark: Down South
Not quite off the coast of Mogadishu, where ‘George Jeffreys Woke Up in a Pirates’ Ship.’
…Africa rained in hot blotches from the mist’s
fin de siècle pastels. No-one budged. Every brain
de-fragmented some economic facts
to de-mystify this odd Apocalypse. …
When Plain Vanilla Futures fall through the gloves come off and the pilots of global capitalism turn to good honest piracy. The tenth coming of George Jeffreys –Jennifer Maiden’s avatar, her vantage point on chaos and strife. He wakes again in a World Service headline.
Not quite (but for awhile) aboard Sheng Keyi’s commuter train – watching as “the wasp of experience” darts at a woman who has “long since surrendered the field of love.” The wasp “stings her heart and it swells.” Emotions too, too sweet, but nowhere to put them. “An Inexperienced World” - the awkward, reticent courting. “Experience muddies us, dirties us, like the woman at this moment – her complex desire springs forth like a clear brook, while another facet of her character restrains her.” Does she keep herself in check then? Does she eat her heart out with relish?
“Old World Charm” - Michael Sala’s narrator can astral travel, we won’t catch up with him. He seems to be two steps ahead of himself anyway. Of his mother, who has become fearful about her sanity:
Not long after that she found herself playing with sleeping tablets and she accidentally emptied a whole bottle in her mouth. When she woke up in the hospital she felt a mixture of regret and guilt. I was having the most wonderful dreams, she said.
Mother – victim. Father – villain. Grandfather – ancestor and spirit guide. “My grandfather died much more predictably than my English teacher although it still surprised everyone.”
Another family romance - Adam Aitken’s “Essay on Fashion” - wry, retro-fitted. An ambivalent look backwards at the ways of Aitken pere. Our man in Bangkok, our man in London - dressed to impress.
London 1964
My father has discovered hip-nonconformity. Spooked by the growing calls of the Now People to supercede the Then Generation, he decides to grow his hair shoulder length, and change the hue of his shirts to pink and mauve. Being over twenty-five he can’t really claim to be young. Whatever he was, he now has to be different. He has to Think Young. He has one advantage: his wife and kids are fashionably ethnic. His sense of the ridiculous is becoming well-honed.
An agency man, an image maker – an Ogilvy-imprinted pseudo-father. “My father is the coolest guy on the commuter train and dreams of buying an MG, or better still a Kharmann Ghia. It makes no difference to him that two children can’t possibly fit in the back. My mother’s not happy that he’s becoming a dedicated GQ man…” A dedicated follower.
A thought for LA, where Heinrich Mann was interred until his ashes were repatriated and reburied in Berlin. And so, a thought for Heinrich Mann and his wife Nelly Kroeger-Mann, both dying in the house of exile. And then a little stroll around summertime Berlin, a city of birds and reading rooms. House of Exile was recently joint winner of the 2009 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for non-fiction. Some readers have struggled with the scope of Juers’ biography and with her interspersion of fact with factification (which others call “lies and artifice”). In “Trouble in the House” Juers is back in Berlin, revisiting the methodologies and defending the theories that underpin her collective biography of Mann and Kroeger-Mann.
“In order to recuperate and compose lives fractured by war, from whatever the fragments can be found, I felt I had to push House of Exile to the further reaches of biography. In elucidating the central narrative of displacement, it also explores the displacements of genre, where fiction, essay, literary criticism, history or auto/biography might overlap. A meta-genre, collective biography defines and is defined by co-existence, by communalities …”
So then, Ah Jian – present at the 1976 Tian’anmen Incident, present again in 1989. Ah Jian was investigated after the first Tian’men incident and was under suspicion of being a counter-revolutionary. After the Gang of Four fell, his revolutionary bona fides were restored. In 2006, Ah Jian wrote a book length account of the first incident. – called 1976. “1989: My Confession” consists of translated selections from his account of the second Tian’anmen incident.
Sure some people died in Beijing in the summer of 1989. But there were not that many deaths, and there is no point making a big deal about it. Considering the number of unnatural deaths since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, more people died of unnatural causes in 1951, 1961 and during the Cultural Revolution. The main reasons for me to write this confession are as follows.
For someone as insignificant as I am, I witnessed something that was truly significant. To be more specific, in peacetime three people were hit by bullets and fell to the ground right in front of my eyes.
The year 1989 was a unique stage where I saw some interesting performances by my friends and people I know. I cannot help myself from writing down what I saw.
Ah Jian’s account is convivial and fairly compelling – he recalls a complex situation through direct and uncomplicated reportage. There is humour too – Ah Jian manages to appear both innocent and worldly at the same time.
I wish to exchange this confession for some money, because I write for a living.
…
This piece is neither a confession nor a self-criticism produced by the government, nor is it a confession or review put together by those uptight pro-democracy types. Definitely not.
A poet and a layabout with an enthusiasm for drinking and pleasure. At ease among academics, writers, politicos and rock stars, the confession is charged with the romance of the revolutionary déclassé.
Early in 1989, the famous art critic Gao Ertai came from Chengdu to visit me. I was not home. He left a note in his beautiful handwriting that said something like: One pigeon, a few rays of sunlight, but the master of the house is out…
From Beijing’s Avenue of Eternal Peace to the Andes, to the Teufelsberg – astral travel, global vision. Turn the page, turn the page, summer is coming, turn the page.
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You can read an excerpt from Sheng Keyi’s “An Inexperienced World” here.
You can read an excerpt from Ah Jian’s “1989: My Confession” here.