The Caseyad

the caseyad, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Sing in me, Obama, and through me tell the tale
Of a man who alone ventured unto Dixien frontiers
To challenge those hordeful slickers and prevaricators
So intent on blighting his beloved homeland.

Born Adam of the Clan Casey in the Smith Fields,
Stood he a man apart.
Eleventeen cubits tall and bearsomely bearded,
He cut a long and fearful shadow,
And was known far and wide.
But before he banish'd Zeus from his thundered throne
And made the mighty Thor to weep,
Before he groped Aphrodite's untouch'd tatas
And boned fair Isis witless,
Before he saddled the dread Sharkodactyl
And ascended unto planet Mars,
He was first defender of truth and scourge of lies.

It came to pass that a rosy dawntide of bold change
Had washed the sullied night off his ravaged land
And young Adam's heart swelled with pride and hope.
But darkly envious minions of night
Watched with a great surge of spite
And quietly drew their wicked plots.
Twisted Apostles of the frigid frost-harlot Palin,
Tea-bagging Furies and Birthers
Of viral lies born on unctuous waves of vitriol.

And lo, Adam saw his shores licked by this infectious tide
And vowed it would not, could not, abide.

Muster'd he his lightning wits and bruin strength
And set out for the very den of the demon,
That black soul-rotting hole in the good earth
From whence are birth'd the delusions and knavespawn
Strangling his countrymen in their perfidious thrall.
Through the mired Limbogs of the Beckcountry
And into that fetid pit he did march,
A brazen light into the hoary darkness,
Wherein the heathen trinity dwelt.

He found them in the whispering dark,
Three in number.
A lurksome Ghoul and a scurvy She-Wolf
Crouching in tacit deference to the third:
A great ballock-cringing Crone,
A true Birther bloated with a brood of lies.
Out-number'd but not out-witt'd,
Brave Adam unsheathed his sword.
Thinking this intruder merely a bewitch'd minion,
In her dull pride the ungodly Crone was swept off guard
When like a thunderbolt Adam did strike
At that swollen purpled womb.

She came upon him
With all the furor of a storm-churning dragon,
Belching her blazing spume of baleful sophistry
Which hath blackened the hearts of so many.
But not Adam. No, not he.
Stood he firm with his truthful sword,
And slayed the festerly Crone,
The She-Wolf and Ghoul looked on the fall of their mistress,
Their eyes flickering with a great and lucid dawning,
As truth began to thaw their bale-frozen souls.

Emerging from the dark,
The sun fell warm upon his skin,
And Adam of the Clan Casey
Knew he'd fought a rare and goodly fight,
And prevail'd.

And so take heed, gentle reader,
Of lessons here enshrined:
That his victory was not in slaying the Birther Crone
But in the match-less bravery of his charge
And in the hearts opened to look upon it.
So take up arms of light, noble brethren,
And chase away the night.
Pursue her to her dank and dark strongholds;
Into every pit, cave, warren, and well --
Bring forth that brave new day.

~

(My friend Adam Casey spotted a GOP booth at a fair and twittered that he should have asked to see their birth certificates. I responded that he must do just that, and that if he did, I'd write a glorious epic poem about it. So, the next day, he returned and threw down with the crazies manning the booth. And that, friends, is the origin of The Caseyad. The accompanying illustration is, I'm pleased to note, by Adam himself. And stay tuned for more, Adam and I are hard at work on an unrelated but surpassingly awesome comic book.)

All Under Heaven 9: Non ho, Shanghai

supertall, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

"Non ho" is a greeting in the Shanghainese dialect. It's their way of saying "nihao" (which as it turns out doesn't mean anything like "have you eaten?").

And that's Shanghai really -- another world. Almost. Certainly another China. Forget everything you thought you learned about China. Wipe the slate clean. We're starting from scratch.

Shanghai hasn't been around since the beginning of time. It was never the seat of imperial power. It's considerable gravity is a very very recent phenomenon.

Before the mid 19th century, Shanghai was little more than a sleepy mudflat town at the mouth of the Yangtze.

We had a glimpse of what this former Shanghai might have been like when we visited a small town called Xinchang just outside the city. It's a forgotten salt-panning village tucked away in the marshes, forgotten since the collapse of the salt farms some hundred something years ago. Xinchang looks like something out of someone else's dream, with it's cobbled avenues too narrow for cars and half-moon bridges arching over brackish canals. We negotiated it's alleys between the sagging timbers of old teahouses and mouldering plaster facades as the elderly, leather-skinned locals turned their curious eyes on us from the windows and doorways of their five hundred year old houses. They'd nod with a quiet twinkle in their eyes or flash jagged, ancient smiles or mutter a tentative "non ho," but mostly the swallows were the only sound. The absence of vendors and surplus of watchful eyes made me wonder if anyone ever comes here. There were ghosts in this place, dead and alive. It was very close to perfect.

This, I imagine, is what Shanghai might have been like. Might still be had the stars not conspired a different fate.

Shanghai (as we know it) was the child of two worlds, East and West, born of the Opium Wars, a trade dispute which saw Western powers divy up the nacent city amongst one another. Trade with the Far East was opening up, one way or another and whether the Far East liked it or not, even if the West had to pry open the mouth of the Yangtze by raw brute force. Shanghai was the port to this very end.

It was a divided city. Like Jerusalem or Vienna after the War. The British settlement. The French Concession. The Chinese City. The sheer volume of authority meant, in effect, there was no authority. And we've seen this before, haven't we. The lawless gold rush town on the edge of the known world. This was Shanghai. Multiplied a thousand fold. Because it sat on two frontiers. This was where East grinded against West. And the gold was more than just a promising lode, it was the wealth of an entire hemisphere.

And Shanghai grew. It grew like an explosion.

By the time the Roaring Twenties hit Shanghai the Roar was deafening. This Shanghai of the 20's and 30's is the Shanghai of legend. Of films, songs, and pulp novels. The Paris of the East. The Pearl of the Orient. It cast a towering glow in the Far East just beyond the horizon. A dangerous and radiant splendor. It's streets were populated by spies and tycoons. By triads and taipans. By witches, warlords, and jazzmen. This is the Shanghai that holds a merciless grip on my imagination. I wanted to lose myself in the mirrored labyrinths of the Great World. I wanted to sneak into a Blood Alley cabaret in time to see a bobbed peach part the slit of her cheongsam to flash some leg as she renders a Cantonese "Paper Moon."

Of course I knew I couldn't. Born much too late. Nevertheless I wanted to see where it all happened.

Shanghai's a different place these days. But she's no less important for it. Lately, she's become the poster child of the new China. The cloud-raking summits of her ambitious skyline gleam like ambassadors from the future (three of the tallest towers in the world among them), lending her the atmosphere of a permanent World's Fair. And on that note, there was one thing in particular I could cross off my Shanghai list. So as soon as I got a free moment, I blazed a trail to the Shanghai high-speed maglev.

It's the first commercial maglev in the world and covers the 30 km distance between the city proper and the Pudong airport in just over seven minutes (about seven times faster than our tour bus). Electromagnets pass the train down the track, cracking speeds 350 km/h in just the first two minutes. Michele pointed out the streaks on the bullet-shaped front, as if thousands of small creatures had met their unexpected end on it's windshield. This train, in short, goes very fast. You know the feeling you get when a plane throttles it down the runway on takeoff? That's what the maglev feels like. Except it doesn't ever leave the ground, it just keeps picking up speed. The landscape outside smears across the window (Was that a telephone pole or a house?). The ride is eerily smooth and quiet, save for the low magnetic drone and the sounds of clicking cameras as the cabin spedometer tops out at the 431 km/h. The point (or part of it at any rate) is that China is as much the land of invention as it was in the days when paper and gunpowder were new. And that Shanghai is where the country's ingenuity lives.

I'd decided that I rather loved new Shanghai -- perhaps as much as old Shanghai. We strolled along the Bund and admired her stately gothic edifices and art deco towers. The Cathay Hotel. The Customs House. The Shanghai Club. This waterfront thoroughfare was the face of old Shanghai's coming of age. This was where it all happened. And I turned to glance across the Huangpu River, to the supertall skyscrapers rising from the opposite bank. The bulbed spire of the Oriental Pearl Tower soared fifteen hundred feet above the river and the stark angles of the 101-story Shanghai World Financial Center loomed behind, her glass-bottomed observation deck hidden by the clouds. And I wondered if the space between the two riverbanks wasn't perhaps smaller than I had imagined.

(Visit my Shanghai set on flickr for more images of Xinchang old town, the Bund, the maglev, and more.)

All Under Heaven 8: That Beijing Air

armillary, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Beijing was my first experience of China. (And yes, I know I already did the Xi'an post and I am confusing the order of the trip here, but just cut me some slack.)

Beijing (or Dadu or Beiping or Peking as it's been variously known) has been the center of Chinese culture since the days of the Mongols some 800 years ago. By itself, an impressive span that comfortably swallows the whole of American history, but to the Chinese it's rather like the last two or three chapters in the history book. Because written Chinese history (just the *written* bits mind you) begins almost four thousand years ago. Viewed through that telescopic lens, it's easy to imagine how Beijing could still be considered the new kid.

The very very first thing you notice is the air. Beijing, you see, is a bit smoggy. Or, to do it proper justice, five minutes in Beijing left me feeling as if I could not up to that point claim to have experienced smog. And I was coming from Los Angeles of all places. But LA's haze (and you'll notice the very deliberate absence of quotation marks) is like a gossamer will-o-wisp when measured against Beijing's sweltering blanket of sooty murk. In LA the very worst of it is "I can hardly see downtown." In Beijing it's "I can hardly see the building next door." Just breathing Beijing's air is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, literally. So, I say again, this was my first experience with smog.

But let's talk about a different sort of atmosphere altogether. The political atmosphere. It is almost inescapable after all. This is the capital of China we're talking about. And Beijing not infrequently feels like the place every red-blooded American neo-con fears the whole of China to be.

Take this as a for instance. There is one very specific reason every Westerner has heard of Tiananmen Square. A reason that can't be far from the front of any Western mind visiting Tiananmen Square. A reason very pointedly omitted from the commentary of local guides even as we crossed Tiananmen Square. And so here you are in this broad, notorious plaza bordered by stark red star emblazoned colonnades on either side, the unblinking portrait of Mao before you, and an airport-grade security checkpoint at your back and at some point you may have the fleeting notion that you might be in a communist country.

There are guards everywhere. There are surveillance cameras everywhere. There are even signs with cute anime-style guards gesturing towards cartoon surveillance cameras like Hello Kitty's Big Brother. It would almost feel a trifle Orwellian if not for all the tourist buses.

Here, contradictions are somewhat par for the course. China contains multitudes, in every possible sense. There is at least as much to like about Beijing as not.

Even here, at the axis of the largest communist empire on the planet, capitalism exerts an obvious influence. You see it in the avenues of impressively garish hyper-modern high-rises. You see it in the ranks of vendors swarming around the gates of any major attraction. It rained on our second day in Beijing, rained hard -- a merciful respite from the smog but not pleasant in and of itself. Well never fear, because no sooner do the clouds open up than some unlikely entrepreneur's tapping you on the shoulder hawking umbrellas.

And mentioning the smog without mentioning the billions of dollars China's spending on reversing it would leave you with an unfair impression of the country's priorities. Beijing has the largest fleet of natural gas buses in the world and thousands upon thousands of recently planted saplings dotting her growing cityscape.

The Forbidden City -- with its acre upon acre chock-a-block with shrines, palaces, and courtyards -- is jaw-dropping even under the dreariest conditions. (Did I mention it was raining?)

And the Great Wall of China... Where do I begin? Here is a wonder, if ever there was one, most deserving of it's reputation. We hiked the Badaling section threading the precipitous contours of the mountains outside the city, plunging down the face of one only to soar straight up the next dizzying slope. Following the crest of the wall up such a steep, stair-less grade can't help but leave any sane hiker wondering, "With mountains like this, who even needs walls?" But only for as long as the beguiling scenery permits such distractions.

But maybe the most unexpected treasure I found in Beijing came in the form of the Old Observatory. Oldest in the world to be precise. Completed in 1442 when stargazing was far more than a pastime. It was integral to the Emperor's authority. For the Emperor was the Son of Heaven, and that wasn't just a lofty pretense. The Emperor was expected to possess a special wisdom, a unique insight into the movements of the heavens by which he could, among other things, set the calendar -- an act of priceless import to a feudal nation fed and peopled by illiterate farmers. And to this end, the Emperor employed legions of imperial astronomers.

The Observatory, for me, was a more than welcome change of pace. Quiet, uncrowded, and preoccupied with the scientific trappings of another age. The rain was lightening, just enough to rinse the smog and cool the summer air. It pooled in the stony crevices of the tree-shaded courtyard under giant bronze armillary spheres and celestial globes intricately gilded with coiled dragons and other mythical beasts. I'd have been perfectly content to explore it well into the day. It was distinctly hard for me not to fall in love with the Old Observatory. Here was an ancient artifact of a culture endearingly obsessed with the stars. It occurred to me that China might just be the perfect place to witness an eclipse of the century.

(For more images of the Old Observatory, the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, and all else Beijing, drop by my Beijing set on flickr.)

All Under Heaven 7: Impressions of Xi'an

the great mosque of xi'an, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

China, it should be said, has a long long history. Something we all seem to forget when we speak of the "Rise of China." And there may be no place in China where the full breadth of this history is more intimately felt than the timeless city of Xi'an.

It was the site of a bustling Stone Age village before becoming the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. And it has been the capital of China for much of a period beginning over a thousand years before Christ and on into the storied Tang Dynasty some twenty centuries later -- right about the time distant Europe was enthusiastically plunging into the thick of the Dark Ages.

All this from a city (I'm embarrassed to admit) I'd never heard of, though I doubt I'm alone in that regard. As the Silk Road fell from importance and other dynasties relocated the Chinese capital time and again before finally settling on Beijing, Xi'an suffered a kind of obscurity until that fateful day in 1974 when a farmer stumbled across one of the greatest archaeological finds of the 20th century -- the Terracotta Army.

To this day, the site is the pride of Xi'an and a vital tourist draw every bit as integral to China's cultural identity as the Great Wall itself.

The story of the Terracotta Army's creation is detailed in a film called The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, which serendipitously premiered on our hotel's HBO the night before our visit to the museum. And maybe it "premieres" every night in Xi'an but nevertheless, I felt I had the whole backstory down by the time I saw the clay warriors the next day.

But seriously folks, the real story's rather more earthly (if you'll forgive the pun) but no less impressive. This extraordinary feat of craftsmanship was undertaken by order of the first emperor of China over two millennia ago.

So what about Xi'an these days? Well, to draw an awkward comparison, if Beijing is Washington, then Xi'an is something along the lines of Philadelphia: older, industrial, and with loftier historical claims. The whole place is boxed in by mountains and rural farmland and, despite it's heady growth, feels somehow overlooked. To its independent credit perhaps.

The Xi'anese we met were less dogmatic than Beijingers and generally quicker to criticize the faults and wastes of the government. From the absent ventilation system in the Terracotta Army's sweltering main pit to the shoddily paved airport highway. Not only that, but the ravages of Mao's Cultural Revolution which infamously sought purge the country of its heritage was largely ignored by the local party officials in Xi'an. Consequentially, as Beijing's once proud city wall was dismantled for its bricks, Xi'an's Ming-era wall still stands pristine around the distinctly modern city center, critical to the city's unique personality.

By and large, and (as with all things China) for the moment, Xi'an seems on the cusp of finding some sort of healthy balance between its modern ambitions and its older heritage. You drive thru the stone arch of the 700 year old city gate, past name brand boutiques under faux Tang-style eaves, and you turn a corner to find yourself suddenly in the gorgeously ramshackle mayhem and crammed street markets of the city's old Muslim Quarter. And tucked somewhere in the maze of winding alleys tangled with bamboo scaffolding lies the thousand year old Great Mosque of Xi'an, her timeworn stones sagging into the very fabric of the city.

The Mosque in particular struck me as a quietly haunted place. Sweat drenched my clothes as I explored it's cobbled walkways and I all but forgot Xi'an's suffocating summer heat. (And Xi'an, I should pause to point out, boasts unspeakably hot summers. 110 degrees that day.) You find the Mosque like a treasure at the center of a crowded urban labyrinth. There it sits, untouched amid the bustle, an ancient place in a growing city, permitted the rare dignity of aging and crumbling like a revered elder.

And really, I can think of no more essential point on which to wrap up my impressions of Xi'an.

(For more images of the Great Mosque, the Terracotta Warriors, and other Xi'anese stuff, visit my Xi'an set on flickr.)

All Under Heaven 6: Picture This

rickshaw driver, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

I'll be uploading pictures from my trip over the next week or so. I've created a collection to this end on my flickr. It includes sets for Beijing, Xi'an, and Shanghai respectively and will, I imagine, be updated in intermittent fits of productivity. You're welcome to check back from time to time if you're at all curious.

All Under Heaven 5: Room With a View

over shanghai, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Incidentally, this is my view as I type this from my hotel room on the 32nd floor of a Shanghai skyscraper. Beat that with a stick.

Tomorrow I get on a plane to return to the states. So naturally I'm pretty stressed about that, but what else is new.

All in all, it's been an extraordinary trip full of much more raw experience than free time to recount it. But, worry not - I'll do my best to fill in all the gaps after I settle down to a pace more like everyday life.

All Under Heaven 4: Totality

totality, originally uploaded by travisbeacham.

Eclipses are creatures of extraordinary coincidence that occur when the sun and moon line up in the sky. An alignment so snug and precise we can just make out the sun's blazing atmosphere outlining the moon's shadow, as if they were made to fit like that. And never mind that the sun is about four hundred times as big as the moon, because it also just happens to be about four hundred times as far away. And so, owing to this odd little fluke of planetary geometry, we have on this singular planet in this fleeting instant of earthly history the rare pleasure of witnessing a total solar eclipse.

It started raining not long after our tour touched down in Shanghai. It was the night before the eclipse of the century and a thunderstorm was raging outside. And even though the worst of the weather had cleared by the morning, it was still dismayingly cloudy. Many among us, very bright individuals, were beginning to doubt we'd see much of an eclipse at all. The outlook was bleak and we'd all just about resigned ourselves to it.

But a chilly wind began to blow across the lake (an oddity in this corner of China at this time of year, I assure you), and soon we began to realize that it was no longer the clouds slowly darkening the sky overhead. To the contrary, the cloud cover was thinning even as the sky was dimming.

And then we saw it. That final sliver of crescent sunlight shining through the thin veil of clouds. There were distant gasps as the wind rolled off the water. The onlookers all stopped making plans to catch the next one and slowly rose from their seats. They lifted their eyes to the sight. The eclipse of the century. The eclipse we had all accepted we would not see.

And suddenly, very suddenly, totality hit and all was as black as night. Lit only by the ghostly ring of the sun's corona shining crisply through the broken clouds.

All night and all morning, the sky had remained oppressively cloudy. Right up until the very last minute or so before totality. The longest totality of the century I feel I have to add. And somehow, we saw every bloody minute of it.

It rained all the way back to the hotel.

Like I said, eclipses are creatures of extraordinary coincidence.