Travelogue, day 4
Shanghai does not wear its rain well: contrary to what you'd expect from a megalopolis on this scale, bad weather only depresses it. The gray sheets that pour down its skyscrapers really are thickly gray, guzzling down air pollution so bad that it seems to haze all views as though reality had become a grainy movie. Where the sunlight struggles daily, rain only puts an apocalyptic touch on things. Nor does it know how to hold it in: the rain has now continued unerringly for over twelve hrs, and Shanghai resembles nothing so much as a wet dog.
I must have gone slightly mad to go Expo'ing in that weather, but eight hundred thousand Chinese people are just as mad as me. The rain mutes the lights and colors and all that remains of all of us is a dogged determination. And Expo-tan, of course, with its water-inspired design, smiling in a way that makes you sincerely believe that Shanghai is pissing on us all, or perhaps spitting as it laughs. But determination has its rewards.
Today was spent, beginning to end, inside the Theme Pavilions: The Urbanian, the Pavilion of City Being and the Urban Planet Pavilion, and the smaller Pavilion of Life and Sunshine and Citizens' Initiative. There, inside these enormous metal and concrete spaces with their unlikely names, I found the Expo that I had truly come to see. The Urbanian, in addition to being a fascinating trove of information about what life is like across the globe, is an utter marvel of hallucinatory design. Even more than the China Pavilion, it gives you the sense of walking into a dreamscape, where all things are things of the everyday stylized into being tilted just so. The enormity of the space, the shifting lighting that creates great planes of light and sweeping angular shadows, the dissociation created by turning the most mundane environments into display cases in such a setting, all force your brain into the nearest thing it knows to this condition of real-but-unreal: you feel thrust into a thick and polished lucid dream, with reality put on display as though to be reconsidered. In one corner, metal desk drawers - stuff of depressing offices everywhere - are piled some three stories high to form the most intimidatingly Kafkaesque sheer wall you can possibly imagine. Round the corner, though, and you enter into a library, built in dazzling crystaline angles with the walls covered floor to ceiling with books. Real books. The fact that all of these books are in Chinese acts as an icing on a very surreal cake.
The Pavilion of City Being starts off in a similar vein, with the entrance hall being modeled after a train station, and its innards looking very much like the set of a Classic Who episode involving a mining or factory planet. Otherwise, it really contains nothing more than a 360 degrees movie screen where scenes display the "soul" of various cities. Very successfully, I must say. Still, it can't compare with the Urbanian. Very little at all can compete with the Urbanian.
Urban Planet Pavilion talks about environmental issues, and does so very effectively. Its designers pull no punches. Reading that in the current rate of consumption, oil would run out
in 50+ years is a bit startling, but not news; reading that copper would run out around that time is terrifying. And that's nothing to the occasionally gruesome, constantly troubling display on water and pollution. As you turn the corner, the walkway that comprises the second hall winds around an enormous half-globe, its surface constantly flowing and changing to demonstrate the environmental effects of global warming. It's quite incredible how something can be so depressing and so glorious all at once. It's the display around the walkway, though, that's the truly moving part, showing all sorts of weird and wonderful innovations and projects dedicated to the ecological good fight. I daresay that seeing this sort of good work being carried on - so much creativity, so much determination, so much care - is more inspiring than any amount of justified fear can ever be. Even if only a tenth of the projects on display would actually be completed and do what they intend to do, it gives you a sense that there is actually some hope in this endeavor, that the whole sustainability concept is not just a finger in the shambles that used to be a dam. When you see other people making a difference, you want to be one of them, too.
Extra sappy today. But there's this other 360 screen film shown at the end of the Urban Planet display, and I will only say that it pulled on all my science fiction lover's strings until that part of me was dancing away. They're very good at propaganda, the Chinese, but sometimes, you really are better off giving on. Such experiences don't come cheap or easy.
I've recorded what must be over forty minutes of notes today, some of them just a bit out there: it's turning into a bad habit. Tomorrow the Puxi area, where there is reputed to exist such a thing as a pavilion without a line. This means going to bed early.
Suspect I'll be dreaming rather bigger tonight.