gpc

The tick-tock dream. I’ve got two variations. 

Variation No. 1 involves an audition. Growing up, I went through a lot of auditions, mainly for violin sections of orchestras. (The last one was for a college orchestra; I didn’t make the cut.) In Variation No. 1, the audition is an hour away but I still haven’t practiced for it. The plan is to cram: practice like a maniac for forty-five minutes and that’ll be good enough for, say, first stand in the second violin section. I open my violin case…empty. I look around the room. It could be under the couch or behind the TV. Or not. I go outside — maybe it’s on the porch or in the mailbox or inside a parked car. I remember to check the time. I have five minutes. That’s okay, I decide. I’ll just bail on the audition — easier that way, I can spare myself the grief. But at the scheduled time, I am standing in the windowless audition room, in front of two judges: the conductor and the concertmaster. “Where is your violin?” one of them asks. I struggle to come up with a reply, and somewhere within that struggle is when I wake up.

In Variation No. 2, the deadline is an exam that I haven’t studied for. It’s a few hours away, so the plan is to cram. Seriously, how hard could it be? The exam is for a course called Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimization. I don’t know what that means, but I know I can swing it in a couple hours. But first I have a few errands to run. I finish one errand and look at my watch and the exam is going to start in ten minutes. I am now freaking out, flipping through pages of notes, not really sure what I should be reviewing. The freak-out process seems to last much longer than ten minutes. It might last for hours, in fact, but I’m not in a state of mind where I can exploit any of this pseudo-extra time and actually study. I’m too panicked and too annoyed with myself for having squandered the time. The only way out is to become conscious in my sleep — to remind myself that I am no longer in school. It takes me a while to piece together the underlying logic: How could you be panicking for an exam when you already get spam from the alumni development office? Why are you still trying to study? You already passed that class, you dumb-ass. I wake up when I get to the “dumb-ass” part.

A few nights ago, during Variation No. 1, I finally was able to summon the strength to reply to the conductor at the audition. I said to him, “Holy shit, I’ve got an exam in a few hours. Gotta go.”

And so I ran off, out of the windowless audition room, and straight into Variation No. 2. 

The Ocean Hill narrator (formerly the Prospect Heights narrator) explains to me her policy on exes.

“There are still things that I like about them that I liked before, when I was dating them,” she says. “So why shouldn’t I try to keep them in my life?”

I don’t question the why; it’s more about the how.

My policy, on the other hand, does not require any methodology. I cut them off.

“Yeah — how about you explain that, Mr. 張.”

I could. But instead I choose to let them explain it, one by one by one, so that I do not have to.

Time to find a hiding place (or a HEPA filter).

Jimmy Rushing leaning on the piano. It’s easy to forget about the piano man in this picture — so I’ll remind you.

—
Photograph by Bob Parent

I first saw Three Colors: Red in Singapore — I remember the surprise of seeing it listed in a theater ad in The Straits Times, a few years after I’d watched Blue back home.

“Where is Yangtze Complex?” I asked my girlfriend at the time.

She gave me a strange look. “Why you need to go there?”

I handed her the newspaper and mentioned the movie — that a friend from college had recommended it, but I never got around to renting it.

“Yeah, right. Bullshit.”

She agreed to take me there and invited herself to come along. “It better be good,” she warned.

The “Complex” was the fourth floor of an old shopping mall in Chinatown. There was a food kiosk in the back and an arcade in the middle — kiddie rides that no one seemed to have used in years. At the ticket window, an older woman presented a place-mat-sized floor plan of the theater, and we pointed to two aisle seats on the right. She crossed out the seats in pencil and handed me the tickets, and then stared at us.

We took our seats. No one else came inside. The lights dimmed.

Over the next fifteen minutes, people began to file in, in the dark, until the room was packed. My girlfriend jabbed her finger into my arm.

“What?” I whispered.

Obscuring the soundtrack was a lot of animated grumbling in Hokkien and Malay. The voices of men — not in conversation, but in commentary barked at the screen. After each close-up of Irène Jacob, there was more grumbling.

I felt another finger jab into my shoulder.

A little over an hour into the movie, the grumbling stopped as Auguste (Jean-Pierre Lorit) crept out onto the ledge to find out the truth about Karin (Frédérique Feder). The ah pek elders and young migrant workers in the theater all held their breath; after an hour of subtitled dialogue and bowling ball tracking shots and Zbigniew Preisner’s plush score, they were finally about to see what they had paid for: a sex scene that had been approved for public consumption by the government Board of Film Censors.

More grumbling — this time followed by a stream of disappointed viewers heading for the exit. My girlfriend started laughing. 

“I almost feel bad,” she said. “The poster gave them so much hope.” 

A small group of holdouts stuck around for the final scene with Jacob and Jean-Louis Trintignant talking in the theater. But by the time the lights went up, they too were gone. 

And that’s the story of how I ended up watching Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Red in Yangtze Complex, a Singaporean soft-core porn theater that is now no more.

criterioncollection:

We’re celebrating Jean-Louis Trintignant with a series on Hulu!

Barry. Then Otis. Then James. Then a Tecate.

The bar here is good for elbows — it has a wide, high rail molding — but lousy when it comes to humans eating off of plates. I look down and see a few other incompletes at the bar; all are leaning far forward, stooped and hovering over their dinners. It could be bingo night here.

This’ll be quick. Something to wolf down. A beer. Forget about today. A beer, maybe two…

The bartender takes my order. Her smile looks a bit clenched — the later it gets, I bet the harder it is to smile in here.

The guy to my left asks her for another water. He is reading Consider the Lobster — sort of. Right now he’s actually busy reading his phone, but next to the phone is a copy of Consider the Lobster in very good condition

Etta — I didn’t know she covered this one. Good to know…

I have a fleeting bad memory of this place. I took a friend out to dinner here a year ago, and she hates cilantro but when she ordered she forgot to ask the waitress to hold the cilantro, and even if you pick out all the cilantro from something it is still apparently steeped in essence of cilantro and she was trying hard to not make a fuss and insisted on not ordering something else and so she starved during dinner.

“The horchata is good,” I remember her telling me.

The fajitas are — is? — placed in front of me, and I join the others in bingo posture. Something seems to be missing. Salt? Hot sauce? No, something else.

I need the neck of a giraffe to eat here.

Hokum Stomp (1930) — This song repeats the harmonic structure of Brownskin Shuffle. It is played in the key of C. After beginning with the chords G7-C-G7-C-F-C-G7-C, Broonzy and Georgia Tom respond to Jane Lucas’ ‘I feel a change coming on’ by playing a A-D-G7-C riff. Upon Georgia Tom’s pronouncement, ‘I feel another change coming on,’ they return to the initial chord set-up. Tom’s next hint of imminent ‘change’ precipitates another A-D-G7-C sequence, which is followed by yet another new interlude. The piece ends on a descent to its introductory chord pattern.

—

Stephen Calt, Nick Perls, and Michael Stewart, in their liner notes for The Young Big Bill Broonzy (Yazoo 1011). 

I always appreciate an earnest hokum scholar.

Shenzhen Frenchman.

—
Guy Delisle, Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China
Drawn & Quarterly, 2006

In about nine hours, including the layover, I’ll be home. On my way to the taxi stand, I run into W—— just outside the hotel. He doesn’t recognize me, as it’s been a few years, but I decide to wave and say hello. He scans my badge for a second.

“Oh — howsit going, 張? Been a while, hasn’t it.”

W—— is technically retired, but every once in a while he turns up in a consultant emeritus role for my employer. That is, if you can find him.

“Well, my last extended disappearance was for twenty-five days. No phone, no nothing. Off the grid in the wilderness. You have no idea how good it feels to be utterly disconnected.”

I mention to him that I’ve moved to New York since the last time I saw him.

“New York City? Good lord, that’s like the total opposite. Hyperconnected, I would imagine.”

“Eh, it depends, I guess.”

I tell him that I’ve got to run to the airport, so we shake hands and agree to continue this conversation another time, perhaps in one year.

One thing I have trouble getting used to is all the belly-button stalking — the friendly, smiling people sneaking a glance down at that badge hanging at the end of the black lanyard. 

“張! How’s the Big Apple?”

“張! I went to college with someone named 張!”

You’re supposed to reciprocate and then address the addresser by name when this happens, but I’m often so startled that I forget to do it.

“Oh, it’s, uh…Hi, how are you?”

At a packed session on standards syntax, I sit on the floor at the back of the lecture hall, next to Bob from Portland and John from Tokyo (he’s Australian). Just before the presenter begins his deck, a pair of brown knee boots steps over my outstretched feet. I look up and see a woman pointing to a section of floor about a foot and a half wide and just to the left of me.

“Can I sit there?”

“Why, sure you can, Brooke,” Bob answers. “How’s things down in Texas?”

“Oh, they’re…they’re good,” she says.

She looks at me and glances at my badge but doesn’t say anything until a few minutes later, when she tells me who she works for. (I once turned down a job offer from her company.) Like me, she’s here to observe, get a read on the customer base.

I ask how she got into this line of work.

“It wasn’t really planned,” she says. “I was freelancing for them a little bit. And then it become a full-time thing.”

How much longer do you think you’ll stick with it? Are you planning to go back to school? What is it that you want to do? Shall we perhaps exchange valuable trade secrets?

Instead of asking any of these questions, I keep it business-like, but at the same time I am tracking things — what she asks me, how she talks about herself, her reaction when she figures out that I’m older than I look.

With about a half-hour left in the talk, she excuses herself. 

“Gotta run to another workshop. It was nice meeting you.”

“See ya,” I say, and in five seconds she is gone.

One of my vendor contacts requests that we meet in person. (Up to this point we have only exchanged e-mails and talked on the phone.)

“Maybe we can meet up near the booth,” I suggest.

At the scheduled time, I notice a gray-suited middle-aged man on the expo floor waving an arm at me from about twenty yards out. He has never seen me before, never seen a picture of me, and the exhibition hall is packed. All he knows is my first and last name.

He grins as he shakes my hand: “Great to finally meet you!”

I scan the crowd for a few seconds before saying anything.

“So…pretty damn easy to find me, eh?”

No, I didn’t really say that. But I thought about it.

I get a message that the marketing team has secured a table for twenty at a steakhouse near the convention center. It ends with Join us if you can. 

Unfortunately my flight gets in late — at least that’s what I plan to say — so I miss out on a night of managers ordering martinis and predicting fallout from the next round of restructuring.

At the check-in desk, a man tells me that they had to switch rooms for my reservation. (The last time this happened to me, I had to keep the coffee maker running at night to overpower the cigarette stench from the wallpaper.)

“Down worry, Messer 張,” he says. “I get something fix up for you man.”

The fixed-up room has a long corridor leading up to a window that faces west, toward downtown. Take a right, and there’s a deluxe suite waiting to be occupied. (“How about maybe we keep this one between you and me, Messer 張.”) I sit on the floor in front of the window and consider possible beelines for dinner…

…The last time I was at a Denny’s was in Page, Arizona — fueling up for the Bryce Canyon leg of the road trip. I remember the waitress talking us into an order of pancake puppies that no one really wanted. (We were too tired to object.)

A pair of waiters are on night shift tonight; the back part of the dining room is cordoned off with the lights dimmed. I’m seated at a table that’s about an arm’s length from a booth shared by two young women who have both ordered avocado chicken Caesar salads with the dressing on the side. Their accents sound West Coast to me. They work together in the same department. One is a Chinese-American who lives with her boyfriend and their dog; the other a Greek-American who recently moved back in with her parents. Like me, they have older colleagues who flew in earlier today or yesterday. Like me, they ducked into Denny’s to keep some distance from them.

It would be easy for me to strike up conversation with them — and for this trip, you could say I’m supposed to, as they’re technically customers (or potential customers). It would go something like this: I interrupt with a question, and after they answer it, I introduce myself and steer them through a conversation that allows me to mention a few things we sell that might help them do what it is they do. I might get an e-mail or business card out of them. I pick up their check and remind them to visit our booth. And that would be the last I see of them. 

But as I listen to the two Californians with their salads, I find myself hesitating. Over the next few days they’ll be bombarded with swag and pitches and propaganda. Why should I be the one who starts the avalanche? Let someone else do it. 

The waiter takes my empty plate and asks if I want more coffee.

“Um…yeah. Just a half cup.”

I look down at the place mat, which I had not noticed earlier, and now I kind of regret passing up the chance to chat up those Californians. Instead of the standard line — “Excuse me, are you here for the convention?” — I could have chimed in with something better, something far stranger and more up my alley.

“Hey — can one of you explain to me why tomato beats bacon?”

Now healed, and feeling obligated to get the most out of my two-minute follow-up consultation, I ask a stupid question.

“So is there anything I could have done beforehand? You know, to prevent it from happening? Diet? Vitamins? Anything?”

“No,” the physician replies. “We don’t really know why it happens.”

“So it’s just bad luck.”

“That’s right,” he says. “Bad luck.”

—
Nina Simone, “Born Under a Bad Sign”
Paris, 1969