imperfect pitch …
So, this is my view from the hotel room in Shanghai. My last day here I am finally losing some of the jet lag. For lunch, I headed out of the hotel, dreading going into a who-knows-what restaurant and spending too much for something not so good, because I don’t know what to order. Or more dreadful yet, I had thoughts of heading up to Huaihai Lu to get MacDonalds, because it would be easy. Instead walked down Fuxing Lu, found a noodle shop where I walked in, and despite them no knowing any English and me being able to say little more than “I am alone” and “I want to eat something.” I got settled at a little table on the sidewalk with a couple of Chinese guys who seemed to find me very funny, and helped me figure out how to season and stir up my noodle ramen (which is what it sounded like they called it), with hand pulled noodles being made by a lady on the sidewalk next to me. Incredibly delicious. I’m brought back to the taste of “muslim food” in China, funky tables and stools blocking the sidewalk. Yum. Oh yes, and while I don’t know how much the MacDonalds would have cost, this was a total of 11 kwai, or just under $2. And then I spent another 2 kwai on a delicious sesame covered sticky rice ball from a little hole-in-the-wall bakery vendor for dessert.
Dinner last night with an ex-student now living in Pudong (new eastern extension of Shanghai) and found that his wife has had a similar experience with hearing loss, but as the result of a tumor. As we sat down to supper, she said “I can’t sit here” and moved to the opposite side of the table. I suspected at that point that something was going on with her hearing, and the story came out in our discussion. Then I received a very moving story from another ex-student via email about her hearing loss, resulting from a fall, and her on-going recovery through application of traditional Chinese medicine, qi gong, etc. I’ll begin performing MONO for real next week, and am now really thinking about how I move from my solo prelude into the body of the work.
Final hearing issue: I got a recording of the concert from last Thursday, and trimmed it down and posted it yesterday. Vicky texted me, saying it was low & slow. I went back and listened. Sure enough, the file was somehow playing at the wrong sampling rate, which made it sound like it was a slightly slowed down tape. Took much a big chunk of the morning to fix. But the lesson is that even when I CAN hear, it doesn’t mean much if I don’t use my brain. Don’t know how I didn’t notice that it was at the wrong pitch in my first listen …
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