Boris McCutcheon songwriter musician Producer

That boat by the rope strung across the Wenyu river,

That little row boat always loosely tied to the tree

Is finally tucked away in the leaves

That sharpened widow-maker by the red path,

Always creaking and sawing away it’s coda

Is finally struck deep in the mulch,

Trap sprung,  target missed

That Bank open 7 days a week

With the little Chinese man holding a night stick,

Is finally closing its doors in the rattling wind without notice.

And after the dust storm

Laid siege to Beijing

Is an Armada of unlikely white ships

in the blue sky sailing

Is fallen ginkgos just showing green, sprawled across sidewalks,

Is sparkling streets with no scooters or cars

And the haboob

blew his plane all the way home

February-March 2023

“Chinese Strawberries” 

My first song written in China.  It originally had a darker tone.  Key of C major

The trees are speaking Mandarin

The strawberries catch my eye,

Laid so gently in velvet boxes

Against the darkening the sky

Somewhere on the other side of the Earth

In a parallel universe 

I'm getting used to being upside down

And talking in reverse

Yellow cranes on the Wen Yu river

Packs of little dogs at the dump 

Mystery meat in a wet market dumpling, 

Early morning sweepers sweeping streets

Somewhere on the other side of the Earth

In a parallel universe, 

I'm getting used to being upside down

And talking in reverse

Something in the cameras can read my lips

And process countless information

There's an app on my phone that knows me better

Than my closest relation

Somewhere on the other side of the Earth

In a parallel universe 

I'm getting used to being upside down

And talking in reverse

Steel factories are back in motion

The sun looks like a faint red blob

Swarms of people pouring into the city

And they all seem to know their job

Somewhere on the other side of the Earth

In a parallel universe

I'm getting used to being upside down

And talking in reverse

Old men fly their kites so high

Big dragons above the temple

Smoking cigarettes and letting out string

And setting a fine example

Somewhere on the other side of the Earth

In a parallel universe

I'm getting used to being upside down

And talking in reverse

And just when you thought you found some peace

There's a blown out speaker in the trees

Reminding you that you're not alone

In Chinese!

And the trees are speaking Mandarin

The strawberries catch my eye

Laid so gently in velvet boxes

Against the darkening sky

October 31st, Halloween 2024

“White Cave”

This was a 5 minute free form writing exercise I later turned into a Drums and Bass song

The air filters are blowing, creating 40 dB of constant white noise. I know this because I measured it with a sound meter app. We leave them on even when the air is clean outside because there are too many to turn off. Two in every room. The embassy provides them to employees in case the hazardous smog sneaks into their houses. I don't really mind the white noise, but I've noticed that I have more tinnitus, but it seems to be in the same key. The air filters also seem to lessen the odor of our old dog and my son's shoes which can be pungent. They also muffle the constant jackhammering and cement mixing just outside across the street where the Chinese have torn down a house to its bare foundations and brick skeleton. That's how the wealthy Chinese want them. Brand new from the ground up when they move in.  In my house everything is white except for the floors which seem to be some maple veneer glued to concrete. The ceilings are vaulted and have ornate corbels, but all white as if they were sprayed with a compressor. There are many windows, but the other houses are so close that they block out the sun for most of the day. There are 25 minutes of sunlight in the early morning, which I savor with my coffee. In the afternoon, there is an hour of light upstairs on the balcony, but it's out of reach unless I lay with my body half outside the door. I refer to this place we live in as the ‘White Cave’. I refer to myself as a cave cricket, and I have grown strange warts like a creature would in the darkness since I've been here. I comfort myself by thinking many great things have emerged from the darkness;  butterflies from a chrysalis, bears from deep slumbers in the wilderness, six million bats from a limestone cavern. 

December 4th, 2023

“Cocoon” 

A poem about healing from my accident

Half finished, half made

Cocoon in a dark place

Not ready for the light or flight 

Transforming in my own juices

My new voice cracking

My bones fusing

This metamorphosis will happen

It is inevitable. To ride the breeze

Effortlessly without burden

A prize for all the bitter leaves devoured

After this 3D printing 

After this Monarch recipe is followed

I will be the same inside. 

The same unrefined hack that somehow knows 

Where to plunge his spade (or find the nectar)

More surprised than anyone

By the abundance that springs from nothing

And the same old friends

Will flash their sweet faces before me

And I will pause in the garden to free them

And shake them from my heart

Whether I’m dreaming

Or jumping off a bridge

The same parade of regrets and triumphs

And reluctance to read instructions

The same attraction to the same elusive orchids 

The tiny ones you must kneel to see in the unpolluted spring

Every other decade if you are lucky

Opening only for the gentle rays of the sun 

Filtered through aspen stands

And the immortal songs 

That are impossible to grow tired of hearing 

Will play like crickets that hold the summer in place

Love is the only map to resolution

For the diminished 

State of this body

Beyond chords with no root

Beyond the tension of these times

The only salve that repairs division

The only osha, the only arnica

What will this world look like with my new eyes? 

How will it taste with my new mouthparts?

Sound with my inner ear tuned with solfège?

Feel with vulnerable wings fairy-dusted?

My soft new body shifts

In its old sleeping bag

Limbs blood fluid and wires

Learning new tricks everyday

Impatient to be a different creature

In a different life

Finally ending the song

Returning to the beginning 

The tonic, the root 

Returning to the one (I)

Voluptuous April! 

Riots of flowers, lilacs super blooming in the compound

Persian yellow roses arching into wild mustard pastels

There by the windrows of leaves and dirt berms, 

Under the cedars I startled them,

the young lovers

As the dog was catching up to me

Along the red path in the Wen Yu River Park

The same bird I never see

Chirping away steadily

As she pulled at her white blouse

Lifted up halfway

Brushing pine needles from her back

The young man parting his hair,  ready to chase her to the ends of the earth

Anywhere to finish what they had started

A raptor crying out somewhere between the golf course and the graves

Frogs croaking, “Orgy orgy orgy!”

An old spring that hasn't flowed in years, spilling into the creek

Peaches open house for the rare bees, impatient

Leaning against the wall like girls at the prom

Waiting for a boy brave enough to dance with them

Petals melting on the moist clay, 

Her kiss exploding on his face 

With enough power to change the rivers direction

He was not expecting her lips to be such a miracle in this wasteland 

Floating his entire life until then, now standing firmly in her garden,

Breathing clean air, a bee like a silver astronaut returning home to the flowers of earth, 

Somehow in the deafening roar of the mega-city,

A joy and promise for the world.

Our trip to Harbin finally happened this past weekend. The family took separate DiDi’s and managed to arrive at the fast train station at the same time. I packed two large backpacks, one with warm gear and the other one filled with snacks for the fast train ride of six hours to the ice city of Harbin. Chinese passengers started lining up half an hour before the train left and we dove into the crowd. We don't have a national ID card that we can scan before we get on board so we have to stand in a separate line with a human being that looks at our passports. In order to ride a train in China, you must scan your national ID to get into the train station, scan it to get onto the train, and just incase you managed to climb onto a 200 mile per hour train illegally while it was moving, scan to get out of the train station as well at the other end of the journey. We finally got on the train and it was very comfortable and I managed to get some homework done. “Sandy” the woman that had arranged for a tour of Harbin had arranged for us to be picked up and taken to the Baroque part of the city. At first Laura was very unimpressed by the cheap hotel I had booked. I thought it was OK. The air outside however was 400 AQI which was pretty shocking. That fact combined with the run down state of the hotel caused us to consider going back to Beijing. I knew that was impossible though and that we had to stick with our plans. In the morning however the air was better and our perspective had improved. We attended the Chinese breakfast served at 7 AM. It was a militaristic meal as they seemed to be yelling at and ordering the participants more than serving them and very unimpressive except for the odd shaped donuts and the sausage. I had known it would probably suck because of the reviews. I asked for coffee and the woman gave me some kind of hot water that smelled like chlorine and herbs. I found a coffee place on my phone and we went outside and we're assaulted by the freezing temperatures which were about -5°F. We wandered around a couple blocks sliding around in traffic on the ice and we're unable to locate the coffee shop. This happens all the time. The apps on our phones don't work because they're not Chinese apps. The locations are incorrect. But we can't read the Chinese apps so we continue to use the apps that don't work hoping for the best. We managed to get back to the hotel and get Jack up and out of bed and meet with the tour guide at 9 AM sharp. He took us on a tour of the Baroque area of Harbin. He said he had never picked up any clients in the local side of town before. This was the neighborhood he grew up in and he was excited that we were sleeping in his neighborhood. He seemed impressed. After some very cold photo taking we arrived at a coffee shop that he recommended. It was warm but the coffee shop was very difficult to order a coffee at because the menu was online and it needed to be scanned to get the app. The app was not in English and I ended up making friends with the manager on WeChat and I paid her for the coffee personally.  Next we went to an old famous bakery down the road.  It was pretty amazing with beautiful huge wooden tables to eat all your new Chinese confection adventures and cakes. We thoroughly stuffed ourselves on cookies, bread and coffee and we jumped back in the van and headed towards Saint Sofia Cathedral and the museums. The Saint Sophia Cathedral is an incredible structure, the largest Orthodox Church in the far east. It has recently been refurbished and restored and they have musicians playing on raised stages inside and lots of art on the walls. The structure was built in 1907 after the completion of the Trans-Siberian railroad. It was gutted during the communist period of the Great leap forward 1958-61 and became a warehouse. We were impressed by the lighting inside and the art and the musicians were enjoying themselves and the sound of the great room. We headed to the museums next. They were mostly filled with Russian art and relics. The Harbin museum was OK. Fairly interesting until we got into the political sections. We left and went to a dumpling restaurant that was delicious. The guide took off in the middle of the meal to go find me a Harbin beer. A very sweet man with the English name of Michael. He was Chinese and had grown up in Harbin and attended the University of Harbin as well. By the way Harbin is a city of 4 million people bigger than New York City. It's considered a small City by Chinese standards. It's a very industrial city with factories surrounding it. Hence the smog. There's a massive river that flows past Harbin called the Songhua. A beautiful name. This is the river where they carve out ice blocks and build giant ice palaces with them, in fact many structures for tourists in the winter. This was our next stop. Once again we went through security and showed our passports and finally got in and we were given chemical heat patches to put on our backs to keep us warm. Michael had timed our visit to the ice palace just perfectly. He knew that the sun would be setting and shining through the giant Ferris wheel and through the ice versions of Notre Dame and various other temples. It was astonishing just how big the ice display was. It felt like Disney World made of ice but much nicer with the lights imbedded under the ice shining up coloring everything. There was even a giant Buddha and bridges and tunnels and an ice bar and an ice hot pot restaurant. I requested that we get some coffee at one point and hot drinks. Michael took us to a place but it only served hot pear juice. As the night wore on, it became flooded with people. We crunched on frozen fruit on a stick, tanghulu. I tried to get the kids to join me in some crazy ice activities like being pulled by a jeep with 40 other people on a giant raft made of inflatables.There was also an ice field of plastic bubbles you could climb into and run around and dune buggy’s you could race around an ice racetrack. We kept making our way back to the ice Notre Dame and the ice version of the Temple of Heaven from Beijing. The people watching was high quality. Massive crowds waited four hours to ride the giant 600 m long slide of ice or ride the tremendously tall Ferris wheel with enclosed heated rooms. The ferris wheel moved so slowly you could barely perceive it changing. We lasted as long as we could and then we jumped back into the van and drove back to the hotel. The next day Laura and I walked to the Baroque area to have coffee and tea and more cakes. We met with a tour guide and went to the Siberian Tiger park. Luckily we got there fairly early in the morning before the lines were huge. The biggest line was the line for the tiger feeding buses that went deep into the Tiger park where the driver would hand you a bucket of pork meat if you paid him 100 RMB. You would then take the pork meat with tongs and shove it through holes in the tiger proof glass and the tigers would jump up and grab it and gobble it down. This is how the tigers are fed 160 kg of meat a day. The tigers that got along and cooperated and didn't fight were allowed to roam through pretty large enclosures. The tigers that tended to fight were imprisoned in a little corrals along a giant building. It was very exciting feeding the tigers the raw pork. We worked our way from one section to the other each time going through giant metal automatic gates like the ones in the movie Jurassic Park. After feeding the tigers, the bus dropped us off near some bathrooms that had bidets with heated seats surrounded by ferns and fountains. From the bathrooms we were funneled into a long corridor that made its way across the Tiger park. It was lined with astroturf and massive metal bars to make it safe and peaceful music played the entire time through the speakers and it was cold. There were a couple of old Chinese women selling chickens in boxes that you could offer to the tigers from the ‘cat walk’. The chickens knew they were screwed. They just had that look about them.  At one point we noticed a drone hovering over one of the buses feeding the tigers. To our amazement the drone dropped a chicken into the group of tigers and they chased it across the snow into an orchard and killed it. I came around the corner at one point and there was actually a liger in one cage and a cougar in another. This was a lot to process as we climbed back into the van. Our next stop was a public version of the ice park where they had giant snow sculpture competitions. They had a smaller ice slide that we went down a couple times. I was pretty nervous doing it because I thought it might hurt my knee again but I managed. Our favorite part of the public park was the frozen lake with strange welded ice bikes.  Some of them were impractical and some very well devised. We had a blast for a long time and even our guide Michael jumped on one of the ice bikes and was cruising around with a big smile on his face. At some point there was a large contingent of people in strange animal costumes and weird house music playing on huge speakers in front of the giant ice queen sculpture. There was also a large black horse with black wings some demented person had attached to it. The horse was not excited about his newly sprouted wings. It was absolutely surreal and I took long videos. I forgot to mention that we had been whisked there by an amazing fast mini-shuttle that took us across the park to the most exciting features. Had we not taken this, we might have frozen solid. We toured the sculptures took a lot of pictures until it finally got too cold to hang out. We went to a noodle restaurant that was owned by Uyghurs (look them up) and later walked all the way down Central Street towards the river and a huge monument. On the way we asked Michael at one point if he had any children and he said yes I have a 12 day old daughter. He asked if we would come up with an English name for his daughter? If we could think of it as a family and get back to him?  The next day as we rode the train south back to Beijing we decided on the name Amelia. I've always liked that name and I've always admired Amelia Earhart although we did not tell him about the mysterious fate of Amelia Earhart, we just told him that it means hard-working and it's a good classic English name. He accepted the name and was very pleased we were very honored.

(Below: Amelia)

Persimmon Tree in Shunyi                                                                          

The air is clear and good today. 

There is a gentle breeze in Beijing 

Inside the 5th Ring. 

My daughter left the doors ajar. 

“The temperature is perfect” she told me.

She went out for a run and an old woman 

Pointing at her powerful legs exclaimed, “Cold! Very cold!”

Niamh laughed and came home 

To let the air into the house.

In the mountains of Northern New Mexico so far away 

There was once an old Spanish woman pushing her cows through ponderosa

Who had stopped and warned Niamh’s mother about the cold and the bears.

“This is no place for a young mother!” She exclaimed. 

Laura listened to Maggie Velarde's advice and pushed the stroller deeper into the wilderness. 

Outside my chamber

Birds gather in a tall tree wedged between the houses

It’s outrageous appearance is hard to ignore.

Today is halloween and nothing screams

Autumn like a persimmon tree. Trick or treat! 

Pancaked pumpkins served on arched stems that bob.

Stiff red leaves stubborn to fall

Flap clumsily as if they were fins

On a fat old Koi stuck in summer weeds.

Large blue magpies, the Chinese call “Xi-que” hang sideways,

And search for soft openings in the tough fruit.

From my angle, they are shy cloaked wizards defiant of the laws of physics

On a huge ridiculous mobile of fruit that hovers. 

Typically loud and harsh

In this ritual they mutter something to each other very quietly

As their heads disappear into the fruit, to eat.

They are satisfied and have nothing to say. 

The last red leaves twist on broken hinges high above.

I would like to leave this earth so decorated

So red and orange

So heavy with fruit ready to eat for “Xi-que.” 

Like this Shunyi persimmon tree 

Inside the 5th Ring

Where birds cling

Defiant and silent as I sway 

Into autumn slumber

An oddity amongst the pines. 

November 7th, 2023

March 7, 2023

This past week feeling settled finally. 

Feeling a little bit more comfortable and my circle is expanding. Highlights were a long walk in bad air to a beautiful spot on the Wen Yu river and then a walk along a dump filled with packs of little wild mutts and then an indoor wet market with plants and flowers upstairs and vegetables downstairs and some bakeries and some potential for mystery meat… we all went. 

Later on the weekend we went on a tour with Beijing Hikers. A company out of Beijing that takes people to the Great Wall and other sights of interest in the area. Beijing Hikers took us to a "wilder" part of the great wall on Sunday and we had a traditional meal served on giant Lazy Susans on circular tables Chinese style. It was a Mao Zedong themed restaurant with flags everywhere pictures of armies and young Mao and middle-aged Mao and old Mao. The food was absolutely amazing especially the eggplant. I don't know what they do to it but I need to learn. It's all about the sauce here. 

As usual lots of weird dreams: trying to find Jack, losing the bug I want to show him, trying to find other animals, snakes and horses, being late at some event. Today I started recording a Chinese sounding theme I had running through my head when we walked the wall…

Feb 2, 2023

Strange dreams last night. Cats. A huge bloody rat – I had a gig with Bard somewhere. I finally started playing the gig and I was playing solo, except there was an old folks yoga class blasting the song on stereo I was about to play. I said something to the yoga class about "stopping my music so I could play". Suddenly I had a gig with Brett Davis instead. 

Lots of doubts about this decision to come to China. I am not sure if it will be good for the family? Can we survive?  is the question I keep asking. Will Niamh go back and live with her grandma? Will Jack become more and more reclusive? Will the school provide better education or will it just cause chaos and confusion and interruption? I am worried about Niamh partying too much with her friends. I am concerned about my mother and how she feels being left behind in Dixon. 

We took on a little puppy today, to foster him and help him find a home. I can already see improvement in the kids moods with the new dog. I think I will name him Pedro. I went to the embassy today and took the tour. Shannon was the guide. People on the tour were tired and not friendly. The group was warned by top security dude not to seek sexual assistance at obvious questionable massage parlors. He held up a pamphlet of one such parlor and shook it. I was wondering if I could see it? I got some help with my phone from a Chinese woman regarding WeChat app.

I got a new Embassy badge. I called my first DIDI ride. I am taking lessons in Mandarin once a week at River Garden with soccer moms. One woman asked me to build her a shoe rack after the first lesson.  I thought that was an odd request.
 

Jan 11, 2023

The wind is blowing like crazy outside. "The winds of change" I guess. 

The phones don't work. The tower is down or the messages are simply blown away?

The moving man is supposed to arrive at 10:30 like the grim reaper or the ferryman on the river of Styx.