Phez Kimono, international gadfly and guest commentator, muses on why people prefer simple answers over complex truths…

When we were mere children, screaming and rough-housing and generally making life miserable for any adults within earshot, one strategy to calm us down was to put a connect-the-dots picture puzzle in front of our easily distracted eyes. How many of you remember these visual games? A series of numbered dots outline a mystery picture. If the impatient little urchin holding the pencil can sit still long enough, and draw a line between consecutive numbers, a complete picture will emerge. The dirt-encrusted ankle biter will then simultaneously solve the puzzle and experience a delusional pleasure from having drawn a picture of an actual object.

Good intentions, as most of us have learned, result in the most unsavory results, often as not. One can easily imagine a gang of labcoated child psychologists hawking the benefits of connect-the-dots games to some post-WWII corporate think tank: It aids cognitive development; enhances problem-solving thought processes; strengthens the ego while reinforcing external rules; optimizes the pleasure experience within rigid social constraints…
And so on.

Now I enjoy wasting my precious earthly existence on idle diversions as much as the next emotionally crippled citizen of our hegemonic hive world, but let’s not delude ourselves. Connect-the-dot pictures can be fun in the short term: You follow a set of simple rules, rein in your fertile imagination and anarchic tendencies, and lo-and-behold, a set of dumbed-down linear constructs results in a cute two-dimensional representation of a pineapple, a clown, a grinning fish of some sort (it was a dolphin, but even this simple childhood training for a life of factory piece-work is too complicated for some of our impetuous toddler citizens).

But we should not forget that connect-the-dot games are exactly that, games. They are not a roadmap for the future, they are not a philosophical matrix for organizing the deep truths of our existence, they are not, in short, a good metaphor for a politically active citizenry.

So, when I hear the ubiquitous earnest-voiced coffeehouse conspiracy theorist exhorting his tablemates to “connect the dots, people! Connect the dots!” you can understand if my reaction is less than enthusiatic. There are entirely too many badly drawn dolphin pictures out there in the political realm, both Republican & Democratic dolphins. I’m not sure if the Tea Baggers are even ready for dolphins.

It is a temptation I understand. My impetuous youth was littered with heartfelt fetishistic projects. Save This! Stop That! End [insert chronic human problem here] Now!

As if devotion to a simple answer would magically make the world less complicated and confusing. It’s important to do something, to make a difference in this world, but heartfelt desire leads quickly to impatience, which leads to connecting dots into a malformed picture. There are not enough refrigerators in the world to stick all these malformed pictures on.

Isis knows I tried. But whether you tie your dreams to a political movement, a mythological figure, or just your neighborhood scary charismatic leader, you are bound at some point to burn out, to lose focus, to ask too many questions and receive too few satisfying answers.

You will burn out, that is, if you were expecting to be able to connect the dots. Reality may be made up of discrete moments, but it lessens us as thinking beings to reduce those moments to dots. Logic is a tool in our toolbox of critical thought. Like any tool, you must learn how to use is properly, to keep it free of rust and the various clogging, sticky residues which seem particularly attracted to anything useful in our lives.

So, to beat this metaphor into a complete pulp, connect-the-dots pictures are fun for kids because they are simple and require minimal patience. But as we grow older we learn that you get out of life what you put into it, and that’s if you’re lucky. If you want to surround yourself with badly drawn dolphins, then connect those dots. If you want more, commercially efficient solar power, bicycle friendly cities, children not made obese from high fructose corn sweetener, then we will have to connect more than just dots.

Impatience is usually the result of false expectations. Our political discourse has been reduced to connect-the-dots sound bites, and Us vs. Them strategies. We expect reality to be simpler than it is, and then become impatient when events are messy and don’t form a simple picture. How were these false expectations instilled in us? The answer to this question, like all the others, comes from not connecting the dots.

I feel like I’ve been walking non-stop for 2 weeks now. After the rigorous schedule I kept in Beijing with my sister (Forbidden City, Great Wall, Summer Palace…) I thought my legs would toughen up, but all that walking (China is big!) felt like I’d been worked over with a veal hammer. I kept telling myself “How often will you get to see all this stuff? Get with the program: Shuffle along, gawk, take pictures, shuffle, gawk, more pictures…”

Then I hit Shanghai which has its own grand scale. Not so much thousand-year-old architecture but more the juxtaposition of traditional and modern aesthetics. Small and aromatic sidestreets, reminiscent of the Beijing hutongs, abut ridiculously huge and eye-popping skyscrapers. Beautiful spacious parks alternate with Bladerunner blocks of vertical concrete and hyperbolic neon. Shuffle, gawk, take pictures…

I had a list, which I managed to follow somewhat. I checked out the Bund. I checked out the music stores on East Jinling street. I checked out the bars on Hengshang Road. The Melting Pot (the sister club of the Melting Pot in Hong Kong) had a cool vibe and a good house band from L.A. Sunday nights is an invitational jam, so I had the pleasure of playing with a variety of great local players & singers, everything from slo jamz to hard bop to avant funk.

Monday evening I checked out the House of Blues & Jazz, which is in a beautiful historic building near the Bund. The aesthetic is old Shanghai and the jazz has a vintage quality. B&W photos of jazz legends like Miles, Dizzy and Billie adorn the walls, and the clientele is largely European ex-pats. One wouldn’t be surprised to see a monocle or two and maybe a pearl-handled cane.

Finally, I ended the night at the JZ Club which has the well-deserved rep of being the main jazz club in Shanghai. The decor is hip, the acoustics are great, and the musicians come to play. Most of them are also teachers at the affiliated JZ music school. It is an exciting and logical development which I hope becomes a trend elsewhere: A nightclub has a pool of talented players, and opens a school where these players can teach interested students. The teachers share their knowledge by day and showcase their talents by night.

I have one more day to soak up the Shanghai scene. If I can get it together I might check out the World Expo even though everyone says it’s a crowd-a-thon. But everyone who has gone says it is worth the hassle, so break out the veal hammer, it’s time for more shuffling.

I arrived Shanghai around 6:30, survived the push-a-thon at baggage claim, got the number 2 subway west to Xujing, where my friend Rick had told me to hail a cab and give the driver my cellphone so Rick could provide directions. A simple maneuver, except that several other cabbies wanted in on the conversation, including unmarked private cabs, and a couple guys on motorcycles who seemed to think my luggage and sax case would fit between their legs and I could ride on the back tire. After a long exchange on the phone, my cabbie nodded to me & we were off through a range of new construction and old villages, arriving at my friend’s swank apartment in a subdivision of the Shanghai American School. After all the hostels, kooky hotels and funky workers paradise apartments I had flopped in over the last 3 weeks, it was quite a change. No strange sounds, sights, smells. Quiet. This morning I found myself sipping coffee in a spacious livingroom with just the ticking of a wall clock for company. Rick & family were all up and out the door by 8am, on the academic schedule.

Over the last two years, Rick has put together a range of jazz classes here. A great vibraphonist, he and his wife, both teachers, relocated to Shanghai from Austin and after the initial culture shock they have grown to love it. I wanted to see what his music classes were like, and he graciously invited me to sit in as his students prepare for their end-of-semester concert.

Rick keeps asking me questions about Austin and I have to stop and think because that world has been crowded out of my head with all the sensory input of the last 3 weeks. I know that once I return to Texas the reality of China will start to fade. It’s always that way with travel; where you are is real, and where you were spreads into dreamlike vignettes.

By day there are so many historical places to visit that it’s overwhelming. The Forbidden City, The Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven. But Beijing isn’t just a city of museums and monuments; the people use the public spaces. The parks and pavilions that hundreds and thousands of years ago were the exclusive provenance of royalty are now the common property of everyday people, and they aren’t shy about enjoying it. One of my favorite experiences is the informal groups of amateur dancers who just take over public spaces, crank up some pop music on a portable sound system, and go to town. Some do formal ballroom steps, some do line dancing, some just look like they threw together bits from an aerobics class. We passed one gathering getting down to a club remix of some 70s rock song. Then a little ways on they were doing the tango to a scratchy patriotic number, my Chinese friend explained, dating to the war with Japan. The lyrics didn’t seem to matter, as long as there was a beat you could dance to. Pretty much the same around the world.

There are a number of lakes in Beijing, and people congregate there in the warm weather as the city starts to swelter. The crowds, a chaotic mix of young and old, pedestrians, bicycles, mopeds, ebb and flow with an organic rhythm which can be exhausting but which is so real and accepting that you somehow feel at home, no matter what part of the world you came from.

The city is changing fast, and one of the things that is disappearing are the hutongs, little neighborhoods made up of small sidestreets, almost alleys, just oozing history. Tiny shops, restaurants, shacks, hostels and hotels are jammed up against each other. It’s funky, and yet mostly quiet and mellow compared to the bigger bustling streets. But like all cities, verticality is more profitable, and the hutongs are being replaced by highrise apartments, hotels and stores more and more. If they can generate enough tourist money, some of them may be preserved, but who knows for how long.

We took a few days for an excursion to the ancient city of Xi’an, the capital of one of the early dynasties (don’t ask me which until I have gone over my notes on Chinese dynasties, but I know it was about 5000 years ago), and saw the terra cotta warriors. The most amazing thing is not that there are thousands of them, or that excavation has only uncovered a small portion of them, or that they are so old, or that they give us a glimpse of what life was like back then. The amazing thing is that the archaeologists have done such an incredible job reassembling them from the countless shards they broke into when the dirt roof hiding them collapsed. You walk into a huge domed area covering excavated pits, and see, next to the reconstituted standing phalanxes of statues, other pits full of broken statues, basically pits of rubble that will have to be painstakingly cleaned, organized and rebuilt. It’s like a 10 million piece jigsaw puzzle, all in brown.

Adjoining the pits is a museum that contains the bronze and silver accoutrements of the warriors, and from the tomb of the emperor, lots of weapons, jewelry, tools and such. The piece I really liked was an ancient silver pick, for a musician to pluck some ancient stringed instrument. Maybe they buried some singer-songwriter in the emperor’s tomb 5000 years ago, to entertain him in the afterlife. A gig’s a gig…

The MTR actually has a subway train that goes all the way to the border at Shenzhen. From there you go through immigration, then board a coach bus to wherever. The Filipinos all have wives in Hong Kong that they visit on Sunday, then they make the trek back to Dongguan to play at the club Monday-Saturday. I guessed that their wives are domestic workers in HK, because Sunday is the day off for all domestics. They congregate in parks all around HK, eating and socializing. Then it’s back to work for 6 days.

The whole journey took about 3 1/2 hours. When we reached Dongguan, we took a regular bus to the city center, then walked to the Vibe Jazz Cafe to meet Freddy, the manager who had invited me. The club was very swank, nice decor & lighting, great stage & sound system. Freddy is on a mission to bring upscale jazz to southern China. The industrial belt that stretches from Dongguan throughout the New Territories is in some ways an international community. Business executives and workers from many countries spend a lot of time there. They patronize bars and restaurants. But so far the music is not what you’d call highbrow: DJ’s, rock & pop bands… music to drink by. The Vibe is a unique experiment. It could be a case of pearls before swine, or it could catch on as people (especially the 30 & over crowd) realize they can have a more culturally satisfying nightlife.

It wasn’t the best plan for a touristic experience, but it was educational. Yau Tong, on the eastern part of the Kowloon side of the bay, was not pretty. The same was true further in at the Hau Tak stop. It was a challenge to look at all the huge drab highrise apartment buildings, concrete everywhere, unbuilt spaces serving as junkyards and dumping grounds, and not see it through my Westerner filter. In other words it reminded me of areas of the U.S. where urban blight spreads, where poor people are contained, out of sight of the wealthy. But that view is misleading.

When I ventured out and walked around I started to see a pattern. The highrises border large and modern shopping malls. You step from an aesthetic dystopia of dirty concrete into a clean and bustling indoor world of consumer culture. Also, when I walked into the courtyards and walkways bordering the godawfully huge apartment buildings, I noticed some effort was put into landscaping, albeit usually minimal: Little gardens in the common areas, with shrubs and benches, a tree here and there. Nothing too extravagant, but it revealed that dense urban Chinese housing wasn’t just a malevolent sci-fi movie, where people are stored in Matrix-like pods.

Rather, it is a compromise between individual comfort and sheer numbers. How do you give every family a decent place to live when there are just so many people? There are interesting choices made about how to develop public spaces, how much money to spend on looks vs. pragmatic use-value. In some parts of China, the public spaces are extravagant statements on the collective will of the people. In other parts, public space is just a means to get from one place to another.

I was going to stay with a friend in the Mid-Levels area on HK island, but her yappy pug dog had other ideas, growling and barking nonstop for 8 hours. So I, like many travelers on the cheap, found a guesthouse across the bay. I had stayed at some funky places the last time I visited HK, but Chunking Mansions in Tsim Sha Tsui is a world unto itself. It’s a ginormous building with shops on the ground level and about 80 different guesthouses above, divided into blocks from A-E. I was in cellblock C.

The location is not bad, just 2 MTR stops from Central in HK, and Tsim Sha Tsui has a lot of high end stores and the museum complex is a short walk, sitting on the waterfront. But Nathan Road, the main boulevard, is exhausting. Indian men, looking like moderately successful businessmen but sounding like shady drug dealers, accost you constantly. “Watches? Rolex? Suits? Armani? Come, good deal!”
I had flashbacks to high school, walking through the Combat Zone in Boston, but instead of Mexican Brown and Thai Stick, it was the seamy underbelly of the fashion world.

Inside Chunking Mansions, you are struck by the mix of sights and smells. Foodstalls with Chinese, Indian, African edibles (seemingly all deep fried) flank the walkway, interspersed with high tech toys and cheap clothing. Wizened Chinese men push trolleys of food, technology, garbage in all directions.

People are everywhere, trying to squeeze past each other. Maybe 1% of the folks are European or American. Big, short, thin, fat, all talking in different languages and all, it seems, needing to get in the same elevator as me. It’s a tight squeeze. An aromatic tight squeeze.

My room was supposed to be in one guesthouse but at check-in there was some sleight of hand (”your room not ready; I give you another, cheaper”) and I ended up in a tiny windowless cell, but it had ac, a bathroom, and no yappy dogs. I slept.

Feeling human once more, I wandered the streets behind Nathan Road, chose a restaurant at random and went upstairs. The waitress put me at a big table with three Chinese businessmen. Homestyle seating. They looked at me. I smiled at them. They moved to another table. Two Chinese meter maids took their place. I smiled at them. They smiled at me. Then we ignored each other.

The waitress gave me a menu in English which nobody else was using. All the items were in the $10US range. I asked if there was a lunch special. She looked at me askance and handed me the Chinese menu, with lunch sets for $32HK (about $3.80US). I asked if one had seafood. “Yes, seafood,” she said and pointed at some Chinese characters. Then she brought a plate of sliced beef and cabbage. But it was good, and came with a vegetable soup and hot tea in a plastic glass.

Before I went back to HK Island I checked out the Hong Kong Museum of Art. It’s a great deal, just over a dollar US, and has 4 floors, with Chinese art extending from the Neolithic period to contemporary. First floor is jewlery and ornamental art, mostly gold. Second floor is scrolls. Third floor is ceramics. The Fourth floor is contemporary and seemed to be devoted to one artist: Wu Guanzhong. Great stuff, especially after having looked at the ink & color techniques on the scrolls, because his technique draws deeply from that tradition. The only thing that bothered me was his poetic hyperbole, painstakingly translated into English, explaining each of his works. But there was one bon mot that made me smile, a paragraph explaining a painting of a waterfall that went something like: “The pristine water reflects man’s essential filthiness.” Right on, brother!

May is when the rainy season starts and the day had been grey, the air heavy with moisture. I took the MTR back to Central and by the time I got up to the street again it was raining steadily.

I ducked out of the rain for a bit into the Harvest Coffeeshop on Lyndhurst Terrace in Mid-Levels. An intriguing retro-futuristic set-up, like if Stanley Kubrick had put a Dunkin’ Donuts on the moon). One presses a button to activate a sliding glass door and suddenly you’re a world away from wet winding streets and loud Anglo businessmen barking into their cellphones in the doorways of pubs.

A polite white-capped barrista helped me select an overpriced coffee and, again like Dunkin’ Donuts, he asked if I wanted milk & sugar (growing up back on the East Coast it was always tricky; the counterman would say “Ya want it white or black? Sugar?” and then he’d dump as much in as he thought best and you’d better like it or tough). He said he’d bring it to me and I went upstairs to the second level. True to form, the coffee was perfect, not too light, not too sweet.

The walls of Harvest were painted canary yellow, to offset the bright orange faux leather benches, white modular plastic chairs and fake wood tables. Black & white photos of 1940s Manhattan adorned the walls, interspersed with giant ad photos of beautiful young contemporary Westerners eating bagels while grinning like idiots (now that would be a tough shoot for an aspiring model: “Hold the bagel higher. No, use two hands! Now smile. Bigger! That’s the best goddam bagel you ever had in your life so smile like your face is gonna break!”).

All of that is just typical Hong Kong aesthetics. But there was also a history of the bagel printed on the wall, and while I’m sure similar histories are on walls of similar bagel emporia in the U.S., I had to come to Asia to learn my bagelology:

In 1683, as a tribute to Jan Sobieski, King of Poland and renowned equestrian, a baker in Vienna, Austria baked yeast dough in the shape of a stirrup. Sobieski had successfully repulsed an attack by Turkish invaders. The Austrian word for stirrup is “beugel” and so the legend of the magical ringshaped comestible began.

What my coffeeshop didn’t mention was that the Turks, while besieging the gates of Vienna, introduced coffee to Europe. So now we hold the mementos of two warring entities in each hand. In fact they have become one, united through the ordinary working stiff: “I’ll have a bagel and a cup of coffee.”

But who invented the schmeer?