Veleur July 20, 2008

The main tenet of the veleur is to let it be and see where you go. Let the things you see guide you. The point is to find your city, for it is what you make it. Along the way you discover the city and the things that draw you. I am interested in the way the people relate to the spaces around them: how they navigate the concrete cliffs and canyons. I set out early again on Sunday, intending to begin roughly where I ended last week, but riding along the north side of the Pearl River. This would give me the chance to ride through Zhu Jiang Xin Che, or New Pearl City, the immense construction zone. I wanted to photograph some of the stuff going on to give people an idea of the scale of the project. Zaha Hadid’s opera house is coming along, and I thought that would be a good place to start. I almost made it there first but a bright yellow tank and blue fence beckoned. I took some pictures, then I saw the open access cover and bamboo stick, like a sundial. I worked on that for a bit with the Canon and decided to bring out the RB. Just as I did, an old worker came out with a wheelbarrow. He put the barrow down by the hole and grabbed the bamboo, which turned out to be a kind of scoop. He loaded up the wheelbarrow with mud that was down the hole. Closed the cover and went back. No time for the RB. Oh well. Made it to the opera centre. It’s going to be awesome. Swooping and delicate, the picture belies the rigid structure and huge girders there now. One of the frustrating things of riding around New Pearl is that roads just dead end. Lights are up, power is running, but the lights watch over a road under construction. Roads wind and twist to end in another site entrance. But it’s easy to get around as the roads are vast and vehicles few.

I made it down one road that leads to the new Hyatt. Wonder howbusiness is given that it’s smack dab in the middle of holes and skeletons. It’s beautiful and I hope it has the same high tea that the Cha Lounge in the Hyatt in Taipei has. I’ll have to find out someday. Trucks and their drivers waited around on the street. Some workers were busy digging in the road. I took some shots around the trucks.

The drivers were entertained by the Mamiya, which I finally got out and working.  There was one moment when I turned and saw a driver sitting in his cab, one leg dangling down, just staring at me. Against the red exterior of the truck, and the black interior it was an excellent pose and one for the memory of photos seen and not taken. I moved on a little.

I found a hole in a fence around a field of nothing, and a lock that had a nice “made in China” on it. Workers were walking through the field and out of the door. It’s these small things that I like to notice and give me some sort of thrill, like finding the quarter in a cake with money when I was a kid.

I packed up and rode away, managing to make it another 50 metres. I had about 2km to ride until I reached my planned starting spot. I would never make it. Another hole. This one in a cement wall, one of the pieces at the bottom making a handy stair. Behind it was a man-made hill, covered in thick grass. I had seen this hill from the office and had been curious.  Again, people were coming down a path which ran along the hill.

I snapped some shots with the RB, packed up, and headed in. The path simply led to the road on the other side, but it provided a fantastic view. A group of workers in the site below called out and waved. From where I was to the river, hundreds of metres away, there were only holes, foundations, cranes and machines.

I worked around there for a while then climbed to the top. It was surprising. Fat, it was carpeted in lovely grass and afforded me an amazing view as I walked around. An old tree pointed up out of the ground, echoing the bamboo from earlier, and the buildings around it.

It was amazingly quiet and peaceful, as if all the noise just lay beneath me, though I was but 50 or 60 metres up. But up here I could find the perspective I wanted—people tiny in the vastness, making their ways, conforming the spaces to their needs.

I then shot a nice but banal image of a flower before the stick. If you look along the grass to the left of the flower, you might see the RB in the blurry background. I knew that it was a trite image when I was making it, but oh well.

But that was that. It was after twelve and I needed to get going. I had spent close to 3.5 hours going but a few blocks.

I wasn’t frustrated but excited, but I wanted to head down to the camera area and get some more 120 film, oh, and see if I could find a nice Mamiya 6 rangefinder. I like the square format and read that the 6 is a fantastic camera. I decided to find a new way there. There’s an annoying military area along the river, meaning I couldn’t pass directly through, so I rode around the outside. I ended up finding this old area with fantastic post-colonial houses. Narrow, tree-canopied streets lined with brick and plaster buildings, taking me back a century from where I was, where some shiny future is being erected.

The hole in the plaster fence and its beckoning trail made me think of Alice in Wonderland. I felt like her, passing through into some strange realm, suspended between things. It was a place seemingly out of time. A place to watch time marching past, measured out in levels and layers of green fabric, measured out in the constant turning of the cranes. Then the trip into the past on the other side of the rabbit hole, where the pace is slow, but where some lies fenced up, waiting its chance to move forward in time.

Here’s a Google map of today’s veleur.

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