Don't drink the melamine!

Dateline: Hangzhou, CHINA

To steal from The Beatles: “Back in Hang-Hang-Hangzhou!” Yes, I was here almost exactly a year ago, except further out. On my previous edition there were faux-Eiffel towers and Trevi fountains. This time around, we’re downtown. It’s the difference, say, from being in St. Charles or St. Louis . . . Westchester vs. Manhattan. As financial institutions crash in your backyard, I find myself once again in the Middle Kingdom . . . which will eventually own them all. Move your accounts from Commerce and Wachovia to China Construction Bank while there’s still time.

But in the meantime, don’t drink the milk! Last year we had fears of antifreeze in the toothpaste. This time around it’s melamine in the milk. For the uninitiated, melamine is the substance out of which plastic dinnerware is made—the kind you find in Chinese restaurants. Apparently—and I don’t know when this began—they started adding melamine to powdered milk (and baby formula) because, when analyzed, it made it look like the milk had astronomically high levels of protein. Except that it’ll kill you. I have no idea how this affects liquid milk—or if it does at all—but for the moment I’m drinking my coffee (such that it is) black.

Actually the melamine isn’t my biggest worry. Sometime around three weeks ago I began getting sick. I appeared that I had an infection that wouldn’t go away, and yet Kari didn’t seem to catch it from me. Eventually I was persuaded to go to the doc-in-the-box in order to rule out walking pneumonia and other worst-case scenarios. The doc deduced that it was allergies and prescribed me a $100 inhaler and Claritin. No change. Still I coughed and hacked like a 2-pack-a-day smoker. Still nothing “productive” about the coughing. Finally, on the 14-hour plane ride to Shanghai the coughing reached a feverish pitch (much to the horror of everyone seated within a 10-row radius who must have thought I had typhoid). There’s no delicate way of putting this. During the flight I “recovered” a piece of food—a spinach crepe actually—that had been lodged in my throat since the US Open. It was a kind of victory, yet horribly disgusting and ultimately not the end of the line. There’s still more to cough up, and each day it gets more painful. Whether this will end with me getting x-rayed in the next 48 hours is anyone’s guess.

Anyway, last night was the formal dinner with the mayor—the kind of buffet with lots of slowly-translated speeches and food that that makes a less-than-adventurous eater (never mind the vegetarian) wince. There were jellyfish and the like. I stuck to the mashed potatoes. At the end of the post there are some amusing signs from the lunch buffet. Please let me know in the comments what you would’ve chosen based on the dish description alone.

Afterwards, Bam and Bouk went on an outing. We were the only clowns with any energy at all, and we were looking for trouble. We found it in the form of “Flower City.” For the record, Flower City is NOT a strip club. And yet, it could be something far more nefarious. It was hard for us to tell. When we entered this elaborate nightclub, a phalanx of identically-clad Chinese darlings bowed in our direction. We were then led to a banquette from which we were to watch the floor show, which consisted of trios of girls performing—one singing, the other two “dancing” with tambourines and looking extremely bored—Chinese pop songs in a kind of rotation. I can only describe their dress as provocative but not vulgar. As two bald westerners, we were clearly the oddities in the room. We drank our overpriced California Chardonnay and tried to deduce the situation. There was clearly more going on than met the eye. It appeared that there were 3 classes of girls: social hostesses, performers, and girls with whom you might disappear into a back room. Each table is assigned a hostess, but ours gave up on us quickly since there was no conversation to be made. In fact, our lack of language skills may have meant that we didn’t have to deal with the upsell. Thank god. All in all it was amusing. Flower City baby.

And now, bon appetit:

Full Circle

Yesterday the space-time continuum swallowed itself. Perhaps it was that supercollider creating a black hole or a tesseract or something. Whatever its cause, the snake was clearly eating it’s own tail yesterday.

I rarely thumb through the Time Out listings for jazz clubs, but I had already read the rest of the magazine . . . and I had time to kill. To my astonishment and wonder I read that Bojan Zulfikarpasic was listed to play that night in New York. That’s when the aforementioned singularity occurred.

Let me start at the beginning. In 1986 I traveled abroad for the first time as part of the Blue Lake in Bavaria summer music tour. I was in the percussion section of a concert band made up of youth from the US and Europe (roughly 50/50 of each). In addition there was a jazz band that traveled with us. We rehearsed for 2 weeks near a town called Rottenbuch, then toured Germany and Denmark for another 2 weeks. (I suppose the use of the word ‘fortnight’ would have rendered the preceding sentence more artful, but I couldn’t bear it.) It was a transformative summer in many respects—there was a first kiss and the learning to drink coffee—but I never keep in touch with anyone from that group. Though we probably had a total of 2 conversations (if that) Bojan made an impression, and Zulfikarpasic is not a name one easily forgets.

Bojan was from Yugoslavia (a country I hadn’t even heard of at the time), and was not demonstrative. I don’t remember him speaking much. But I remember him playing piano. He played piano in a way that was entirely foreign to me. I’d taken lessons for 10 years by that time and could get by, but Bojan was playing something I’d never heard before: jazz. I don’t mean that I’d never heard a ‘jazz’ piano before, but this was different. He was composing on the spot. He knew every standard in every key. I could sit and watch him for hours (and did).

When I got back to the states I told my mom about it, and she made some phone calls. If this was my new passion, then she was going to get me lessons. It was probably a year later before I started in earnest, but the memory didn’t wane: it waxed. I tried to buy records that could bring me back to that place, but it all sounded either overproduced or sterile. One thing led to another and I slowly learned to re-learn my instrument. Slowly and arduously. I was clearly not a natural. Even so, I chose jazz as my major and studied it as best I could.

I began listening to Oscar Peterson, Bud Powell, McCoy Tyner . . . but Bojan had a special place. I wondered how he had been essentially my age and yet playing like he’d lived several lifetimes. I wondered if my mind had been playing tricks on me, and maybe he wasn’t really what I’d remembered. I remember thinking about him again around the time of Bosnian war. He was the only thing I new about Yugoslavia, so I wondered if he survived.

Then yesterday. Apparently he was alive. And well. And playing in New York. I went to see him and, I am happy to report, he plays with the same consummate energy I’d remembered. He’s recorded several CDs (available on itunes) and has a thriving career in Europe. He lives in Paris. To call him ‘good’ is an understatement. He recently won an award the claims to be for ‘the best jazz musician in Europe’, which is pretty broad. As a jazz musician, there are really only two challenges: 1) can you play what you hear; and 2) do you hear something interesting? This guy hears things that fall in the cracks, and he uses his technique to dig them out. Never flashy for its own sake, I witnessed a left hand that was frightening.

Yes, I said ‘hello’ and gave him a much-abbreviated version of this anecdote. He was freaked out, of course, and totally affable. Perhaps we’ll try to keep in touch. After all, once you’ve traveled Germany in a matching baby-blue polo shirt with someone, there’s a kind of a bond.

Ursa Major

Dateline: Kodiak, AK

They say there’s an equation in Kodiak that goes like this: 1 sunny day erases 3 days of rain (in one’s memory). This may be true, but it hasn’t stopped raining since I arrived here 5 days ago. So, I can’t yet vouch for the theory. By all accounts, though, we’re supposed to have sun this weekend, so at least there’s that.

Not much to report when things are running smoothly. Campers seem happy; counselors seem happy; and this coach is doing much better physically than he was just a few days ago. Peter keeps offering the kids bribes to do impossible tricks. He almost had to buy a cake for a group yesterday, but he lucked out at the last minute.

What else? The daily newspaper seems to always feature some wildlife photo on the front page. Yesterday it was otters. This in spite of the recent appearance of trio of bears in town. I guess no one got their pictures, but apparently one had his way with a car last night. Keep in mind that when I say “bears”, I don’t mean your average black bear from the Midwest. I mean BEARS. BIG bears. “Monsters that eat your head” kind of bears. People can pay hundreds of dollars to take sea planes out into the wilderness to see Kodiak bears, so I’m choosing to regard the visitors as a cost-saving measure. I’ve been here twice, and I’ve yet to see one. I’ll keep you posted.

Speaking of bears, the subject of polar bears came up again the other day. Sandy—the camp organizer—has moved to the end of the Earth (Barrow, AK), where no humans were ever meant to live. It’s polar bear country up there, and she enlightened me on something we “outsiders” (that is, residents of the lower 48) don’t understand. Here’s the thing: despite global warming and the polar bear’s recent endangered status, there are more polar bears than there ever have been. Really. You see it’s easier to generate sympathy for polar bears than protect their environment through other measures. They're political pawns really. Do the ends justify the means? Well, maybe.

If I don’t write again after this weekend, you’ll know what happened. Hint: rent “Grizzly Man.”

Back From the Dead

Dateline: somewhere over Montana, probably

Miss me?

Yeah, I know. If any of the bloggers I read were to go this long between posts, I’d stop checking. What follows is a very abbreviated accounting of what went on during the interval and the occasion of my return.

First and foremost, this blog was created in order to chronicle the adventures of a working clown on the road. Unfortunately, the last 6-months haven’t involved much traveling to bring comedy to the masses. In fact—thanks I suppose to the current recession—there hasn’t been nearly enough work at all. Two different trips to China (about which I had hoped to blog) were cancelled due to acts of God, and what few gigs I managed to pick up would hardly elicit much excitement. It’s true, there was the drama of bringing every piece of gear I own except my stilts to a gig where I needed ONLY my stilts. But I doubt most of you would be too interested in how Cheryl Shruffer rode in on horseback, wearing a cape, and saved me from professional black-listing with a loan of the missing item.

The notable exception to this artistic drought was the two-week off-Broadway run of Bambouk: bald comedy, in tails. that took place in late April and early May. While hugely important in the arc of my professional career, it doesn’t—properly speaking—belong in a travel blog, as it went down less than 10 miles from my apartment. Still, there were enough peaks and valleys in the course of putting up the production to justify its own blog. There was the drama of booking a theatre and later having our contract cancelled (in favor of a bigger show) and the subsequent move to a larger space. There was the fiasco of misprinted t-shirts and a stolen camera. Over the course of two weeks we learned a lot about our show, New York audiences, and how we are not the marketing geniuses we had hoped to be. Much good came from the experience, none of it financial. Video from the show is currently being compiled into promotional material. A rough draft of it can be seen here:

I would be remiss in not pointing out the dramatic changes in my personal life that occurred in the past 6-months. Over the Christmas holidays I managed to secure the lease on a studio apartment in the Bronx. This is remarkable because I hadn’t been on a lease since ’03, and my rental history had more-or-less evaporated. I had lived there nary 3 months when Kari agreed to move in with me. The gods had somehow conspired to stabilize both my love life and living situation in one fell swoop.

That said, perhaps you’re wondering what finally got me off my duff and back to this blog. It’s simple: I’m writing this from a plane en route to Kodiak, Alaska where I’m going to spend the next two weeks working with my old friend Peter at a circus camp; and, so, as this constitutes travel for the purposes of art/work/education/commerce I felt remiss in not keeping you posted. For the record, I taught here last year with Brian, before this blog began. With any luck, these kids will provide fodder for stories. Or perhaps I’ll be attacked by a bear . . . though you’d probably hear about that on the news and not here.

In completely unrelated news, I’ve been listening to Stravinksy’s “L’histoire du soldat” after hearing it on the radio for the first time the other day. I don’t know how I got to be this old without discovering it before now, but it’s awesome. If you find you’re similarly unaware of it, I recommend downloading it.

The Kindliness of Strangers

Dateline: Tokyo, JAPAN

As Friday wore on and the last shows were in the bag, the pace of life began to accelerate exponentially. Suddenly everyone’s agendas were at odds. Some wanted to bar-b-que; others wanted to cruise on a boat through the park; and more than a few wanted to hook-up with that special someone they’d been crushing on for weeks. What we all had in common was we needed to pack our heaps of crap into far too few bags and clear out of our rooms. And we had to do this by 4:00 AM when the bus was to pick us up and drive us to the airport.

It was a day of minor catastrophes for me. On the last trick of the last show I dismounted my unicycle for the 42nd time on the World Bazaar stage and it came crashing down behind me just as it always does. This time, however, the pedal hit the stage in such a way as to crack it completely in two. I packed it away as is, just being glad I wouldn’t have to worry about repairs before I was back in NYC. Then my bowler hat went missing. It was at large for several hours until one of the staff found it in the back of a van. (Not my fault.) Finally, I managed to overturn a bottle of latex nose-glue causing an awful mess before going out to do my last set. (My fault entirely.) All these things sound pretty minor a day (or even several hours) ex post facto, but at the time they were occurring they stressed me out considerably.

Somehow in the middle of this Jessie (a clown from CA, my replacement) convinced me to give up 40 minutes to ride one of the rides I’d not yet ridden. We had our faces scanned with clown noses and got to see ourselves in an animated space movie.

The B-B-Q was a cold and dark affair. The remainder of a bottle of Johnny Walker was my substitute for both food and mittens. My intention to sleep as much as possible was thwarted by the aforementioned Hungarian Lotharios and other inconsiderates who slammed doors until the bus arrived. At the airport Taiko again informed me that the adventure I was about to embark upon was highly irregular and against her better judgment. I thanked her and hugged her awkwardly before leaving the pack and descending into the bowels of the Fukuoka subway system with suitcase and accordion in tow.

5 hours on the shinkansen (bullet train) took me halfway across the country. I saw Mt. Fuji at 200 mph, and listened to French pop music. Officially—at least according to me—the last line of any haiku needs must be “I see Mount Fuji”, so I was glad to be able to check it off the list, even if it is really no different than another snow-capped peak when whizzing-by at light speed.

As a clown, one of my strengths is showing pain. Well, not so much pain as struggle and desperation. I discovered looking calm and collected gets you no help when you need it, so I grimaced wildly as I tried to manage my oversized suitcase, accordion and backpack against the throng in the Tokyo train station. What I had been trying to do, unsuccessfully, was to purchase a subway ticket to get me to the inn. As previously mentioned, I was doing this on almost no sleep. I had eaten nothing but a couple rice cakes and “Amino Value” drink in close to 16 hours. Finally, after about 45 minutes of trying, someone approached me and asked me if I was going to die. Well, not actually that, but I imagine that was the subtext of “can I help you?” in this particular circumstance. She was my first angel of the day, but she wouldn’t be my last. She managed to get me to the train I’d been seeking so desperately.

A short ride later the situation repeated itself as I tried to find the inn. For those of you who’ve never traveled in Asia, let’s just say that it’s entirely different than traveling in America or Europe in that street names are almost irrelevant and decidedly not marked. Any map or set of directions is open to wide interpretation. There is no “turn left on MAIN, go two blocks and make a right on 2nd Ave.” My directions to the hotel were as follows (compliments of Let’s Go Japan): “From the west exit head towards the police box and cross to KFC. Turn left, continue 3 blocks, and go right at Sumitomo-Mitsui bank. Take the 4th left at the major intersection, 3rd right before the pharmacy, and 1st left. It’s on the left in illegible kanji (Japanese characters).” Let’s just say that the “sumitomo-Mitsui bank” must have closed since the publication of this book. I pushed my load through the hoards of people for a long while when I decided I’d gone too far and turned around.

About then I met my 2nd angel. She was on a bicycle and probably all of 19. “Excuse me, are you looking for Kimi Ryokan?” Indeed I was. How did she know? She declared that she often saw Westerners with suitcases looking confused. She turned me around, and proceeded to escort me through a series of winding streets with no markings to the very non-descript building that I certainly would have never found. “Here you are,” she said, and spun around on her bicycle and disappeared as I shouted hearty thanks.

Once unloaded and checked in, I chose the path of least resistance—Subway. A foot-long sandwich with guacamole was something I hadn’t even contemplated in 2 months, but in Tokyo you can get anything. I took a walk and eventually ended up at the National Theatre. I considered seeing some kabuki, but then realized I was dying of fatigue. My head was splitting open. Here I was on vacation and I hadn’t slept in almost 24 hours, maybe more. I reasoned that if I went to bed at 6:00 PM I could stave off the jet lag when I got back to New York AND get to be a party animal by closing down dance clubs at 5:00 AM. (What WAS I thinking, honestly?) Let’s just say that getting back to the inn was less simple without my bicycle girl, but eventually I did. I went to bed for what I thought would be a long winter’s nap. An hour later the phone rang. I rolled over and ignored it. 2 hours later it rang again. I picked up. There was a message from the front desk. Sara had been by to see me and had left a message. She was available to hang-out tonight. When the room stopped spinning I realized that it would be rude for me to blow off my 3rd angel of the day. After my nap I was feeling a bit refreshed anyway.

What followed was a rendezvous for pizza, coffee, and conversation. Nothing remarkable to blog about, but it was good to not be alone in the big city. We have plans for tomorrow, but I’ll close this out because this time I really AM going to bed. I’m not kidding.