Today I went to a memorial performance for Pan Chenggen, an old man guitarist I ran into a few times last year at Ming Room, the little "private study" I like. To be honest, I didn't want to go, though I feel like I'm letting Pan xiansheng down by admitting that. I'd gotten half drunk last night for no real reason, and slept in until 10am, which felt really late for me. I read a novella by Mian Mian the other day that's put me in a strange mental state, so I wanted to try writing about it this morning, while the world outside my window was weighted down with white mist. As soon as I began to type a few words, my girlfriend woke up and asked me to go walk our dog to the mattress store she likes to spend her weekends at, once again trying out every mattress they have, getting the cargo pants wearing lady who works there to show her whatever new sleeping implements they happen to be stocking at the time. I didn't want to do that either, but I felt I had no choice. I've been feeling so distant from my girlfriend lately. Not an emotional distance -- I just mean I never get to see her. I'm at work all day, and it feels like every evening I have one task or another I have to do that keeps me out until 11pm. I'd already promise Ming Room's owner, Xie Wang, that I'd go to Pan xiansheng's memorial at 3 in the afternoon, and my girlfriend was going to the mattress store with or without me. If I didn't go with her, than yet another day would go by apart, so whatever I had to say about Mian Mian needed to be put aside for the time being. So we carried our dog into the elevator, descended 30 floors, and went out to Zhaohua Road to get breakfast before walking the rest of the way to C-Park, where the mattress store is located.
I didn't realize C-Park was named that until recently. I always called it Liu Haisu park, because it's right behind the Liu Haisu art gallery. I've lived within a ten-minute walk of the Liu Haisu art gallery the entire time I've lived in Shanghai, yet I've never stepped foot inside. They always have big advertisements in the West Yanan Road metro station about whatever exhibits are going on there -- usually involving the stereotypically Chinese style of shanshui landscape paintings that my girlfriends parents forced her to study as a kid, and which now make her roll her eyes whenever she confronts them. I bought a copy of the Mustard Seed Garden a few months ago because I figured I could try my own hand at shanshui paintings in an attempt to rebel against her. I spent a few days trying to copy the barren leafless tree trunks on the first few pages of the book, but their leaflessness made me depressed. Now the three volumes of the painting manual sit on the shelves of this too-big apartment we moved to last December, where I continue to feel like a stranger.
C-Park has big underground mall that used to house a pet store, but was turned into a nexus for livehouses and music bars. All the old livehouses that have shut down over the past few years for one reason or another, like Yuyintang, Specters, and Sympathy Angel, have moved there. If anyone cares to ask my opinion, I feel like it cheapens all these places. The whole complex feels like INS, but for people that like rock music instead of electronic music. INS is a massive complex of clubs near Fuxing park where 20-something guys stand around and ask random girls for their Wechats, then at 5am everyone goes outside to vomit beneath the rising sun and pass out on park benches. It was founded by a billionaire blazer-and-t-shirt-wearing "E-Sports entrepeneur", which makes me curious if there's some similar personality behind C-Park, or if something else is going on that caused it to spring into existence.
I'm just biased against INS and C-Park because they're new. Maybe in 20 years once they're old and grimey feeling, I'll find myself wandering through them, filled with yearning. I suppose I already have nostalgia for how C-Park "used to be", just a few years earlier, right after they'd finished construction on it. It contains a massive hill that descends below the earth, the frequent location of mini art festivals and free music events. While the cranes and bulldozers were still there, I assumed that that hill was the foundation for a parking garage, so when it finally opened up and turned out to be a little grassy zone ending at a concrete underground-plaza at the very bottom with a strangely-incongruous dark-red wooden door that led into a fog-filled orange cafe/bar that evoked images of gambling-dens from exotic lands -- my imagination was piqued, to say the least. I wrote these paragraphs about it for a short story I never managed to turn into anything coherent:
We walked down the hill, machine-gun like drum beats resonating from below. I went first, holding Madame Eggplant’s hand, snaking past picnic blankets and bystanders as we descended. The hill went down into a concrete square that opened up to the subterranean mall. On weekends people came here to walk their dogs on the grassy hill, and you’d see kids with dyed hair skateboarding on the concrete below. Today they had speakers and a stage set up right at the interface between grass and concrete. Looking down, I could see a thousand different human heads in a thousand different shades of red, black, pink, purple, green, yellow, blue and even white. The lower parts of the hill also had people standing and dancing. It was only at about halfway up the hill that it started to get less crowded and you saw people sitting, with just enough space between each little huddle to walk around them.
As we went down the music became more and more distinct, rather than just a fog of echos mixed with the sound of a thousand conversations. At some point, we were no longer walking, and instead were wading through the crowd. I never let go of Madame Eggplant’s hand, terrified that if I did she’d be gone forever. As soon as we stepped from behind the speakers to in front of them, we entered another world.
Years later people would talk about this as the last hurrah of our nation's DJ scene, before foreign vinyl flooded the market and the national electronic music style lost its individuality and became globalized, just like everywhere else in the world. At the time though, I thought this was all cheesy. 24 hours of hardcore breaks, rhythmic screeches, tape machines made to do things they’d never been designed for. I guess we weren’t used to this music being played in the middle of the day, in a place you could bring your grandmother to.
The mall is still there, but they dug out the hill and turned it into a parking garage. It’s completely covered now. There’s grass on top of it now, which still functions as a dog park when security guards aren’t around, though there’s big “no dogs allowed” signs everywhere.
When the suboptimalist was in Shanghai last for the mid-autumn festival last year, I took him to Wigwam, the aforementioned orange bar at 3am one day. We sat across from each other at a little table, barely able to hear each other beanth the all-consuming sound of the DJ. I wanted to explain to him why I found this place so magical, yet no words came to mind. Maybe it was simply because the only things at the bottom of this hill were this strange bar/cafe and the massive pet store beside it -- the mall in my little story didn't actualy exist. Now that the pet store is gone and has burned turned into a music complex, somehow the place feels less odd and inscrutable to me. Wigwam isn't a strangely positioned world in and of itself, but one hip place for young people in a whole sea of hip places. Where's the fun in that?
This is what I thought about today, as we stood inside the mattress store just outside of C-Park. Part of me wanted to descend down into the complex again and see what it's like during the day, when all the bars and livehouses are closed, but once my girlfriend had her fill of mattress shopping, we parted ways. She continued walking the dog, and I headed back home to get ready to go to Pan xiansheng's memorial. I'm not sure what I was expecting the memorial to be like. Xie Wang's niece had made a fancy looking poster for it, so I couldn't not go. But all of the old men playing Beatles songs and guitar solos in honor of old Pan made me sad. Zhou Zifeng, guitarist of the band Iron Magnolia kept trying to get people to speak in Mandarin instead of Shanghainese so that I'd understand what they were talking about, which only made me sadder. Of course the particular brand of sadness I felt wasn't the kind one would hope to feel at a memorial for a strange personage who had recently died -- it was instead the normal sadness I feel whenever I see a curiously shaped human face materialize in front of me on the street or hear a stranger make involuntary frog-like croaks while sitting next at the library.
"Why is it you I've crossed paths with? Don't you deserve someone greater than me?"
Whenever Pan Chenggen came up in conversation, people liked to talk about how he'd invented his own incomprehensible English-resembling language in order to sing his covers of old blues, country, and reggae classics. The song I remembered most though, when I saw him play in December, was his version of 疯狂的世界, a song from old Shanghai cinema. Someone asked him if he knew any Chinese songs, and it seemed strangely fitting that this is what he responded with, of all songs.
你们太痛快，太奇怪: You're all too happy -- too weird!