Moxizi's poem: Liangshan is a huge net
Mo Xizi's poems are in the Midi Book House Photo/Southern People Weekly reporter Meng Yiyi
Yamatani Round, Arahara Rui
For non-first- and second-tier cities, the new crown epidemic at the end of 2019 may be a gap in a sense. The flow of labor, wealth, and culture brought about by the return of population during this period made the returnees look forward to the old life, and they tried to make the town accommodate something other than the everyday.
It was at that time that Mo Xizishi returned to Xichang. Landing at the airport and driving north to south along the narrow terrain toward the city center, like most county towns in China — even if it's the capital of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan — you'll pass a large area of car shops on the outskirts of the city, an old town still being renovated, a few tall buildings, and then arrive at Torch Square, an urban landmark by the Qionghai Sea. When he left for Shanghai in 2006, the Torch Square was about to be completed, and 56 giant pillars of nearly 10 meters were gradually erected, symbolizing national unity.
There is a curved block on the edge of the fan-shaped square, and the first entrance is a 300-square-meter rehearsal hall, which was vacant during the epidemic. When Moxizishi came back, she heard that it could be used and wanted to do something.
He had a little clue about opening a bookstore. He loves bookstores and makes people feel calm, and after visiting the one-way street space in Beijing, the pioneer bookstore in Nanjing, and the Xinshan Bookstore in Chengdu, he found the multi-purpose space containing the bookstore also very interesting. The original intention of opening a bookstore was to bring more culture to the remote Liangshan, so Mo Xizishi originally wanted to open it in Baimiao Village, a small village more than ten kilometers away from the center of Xichang, his birthplace. But there were very few people in Baimiao Village, and he didn't want to die, so he decided to settle in the rehearsal hall first. Before the renovation had begun, Moser Iro came to him.
Ilo, who studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem majoring in Global Localization Development, is a relative of Mossi's large family, and has taken online classes at home after returning home due to the pandemic. During that time, she and her friends felt that there was a lack of cultural activities in their hometown and that they were a little bored. They wanted to hold some activities, so they came to Moxizishi.
Several people meet, sum up, and decide to start with what interests them. The events in the vacant rehearsal hall of Torch Square were soon set off. On April 25, 2020, the first event landed, the "Marriage and Gender" theme cultural salon, which discussed topics such as the phenomenon of high bride price in Liangshan society and the role of different genders in marriage, followed by the "Rush Laro" retro market, "Baba Movie" viewing party, "Dress Up Party" sharing meeting, and movie marathon.
In about two weeks, they can come up with a new idea, then plan and implement it, which will last from April to August. These small, spontaneous events are not publicized through any public channels, but are only circulated among friends.
"At that time, I was very happy, I was happy every day, and I was finally able to go back to my hometown and do something. Moxizishi is very happy that returning to his hometown has been his "ultimate dream" for many years, "We ourselves feel that it is very meaningful, and all kinds of young people come to participate. Although there are not many people, I can finally speak up here, instead of eating and drinking as soon as I come back, as I used to do. ”
The most crowded was a movie party, where fifty or sixty people came together to watch director Wanma Tsedan's "Killed a Sheep". Iro's mother, a retired doctor, brought old white sheets from the hospital to make a curtain for them. The rehearsal hall was low and depressing due to the foam wall on top, but "I didn't think there was any problem at all when I was on a whim."
Viewing activities in the old rehearsal hall Photo/Courtesy of the interviewee
Mo Xizishi also thought about opening another room to Baimiao Village when this space was working well.
2020 is the last year of the national poverty alleviation campaign, and in the five years before that, Xichang Municipal Finance has invested more than 100 million yuan every year to implement "non-stop road construction, more than housing construction, and industrial development". Many places in Liangshan began to be demolished, old houses were renovated, rammed earth houses were overturned, and a large number of old objects were mixed in the ruins. When Moxi and his friends went to the surrounding counties of Butuo, Zhaojue, and Meigu to play, they would pick up some by the way.
Mossizi used these old objects to do an exhibition. "Old sheepskin drums, withered dustpans, pots with dull lacquer, wrinkled pots, rusty iron pipes, moth-eaten wooden beams, bamboo mats, bells, wooden buckets, and wooden hammers that will never be used to ram earth again. A simple wooden frame is then built out of wood, and the objects are hung on top of a thin thread. "Knocking on old objects and making sounds, as a way to evoke memories of the origin and the place where it came from at a time when development is accelerating. Moses called it the "Wasteland Gramophone Exhibition".
Very little information has survived about this exhibition, including all their other activities, and occasionally you can see some fragments from interviews with Moxizishi in the past two years or from the official account that has long since ceased to be updated. They continue in leaps and bounds, and the people who came to the previous event sometimes become the initiators of the next event, such as Gokiyisin, a core member of the team.
They later named the entire series Echoes of the Valley and expanded it into a platform. "We live in the valley, and things from the outside world come and collide with us, so there is an echo. "What we want to do is to express the voice of the youth of Liangshan, and this voice can only be produced after the impact and interaction of external forces. ”
Wasteland Gramophone Exhibition Photo/Courtesy of the interviewee
Very good, but also slightly distressed
In August 2020, Yiluo left Xichang and went to school. In September, Isin also went to Chengdu. The team members left their hometown one after another, and Moxizishi began to renovate the bookstore.
When the interior was renovated, the old furniture had to be moved to the yard, which was originally a dirt floor and full of trees. Old furniture was piled under the tree, barely covered with tarpaulins. As a result, after a rainy season, most of them are still rotten, and when the sun shines, they are all deformed.
His passion for plants continued unabated, and Mossi's poetry indulged in finding, excavating, and caring for plants. He spent 30 yuan to buy a huge vajra from a demolition household, so strong that it was like a guard, agave and epiphany were planted in the same cement pot, and nearly two meters of monstera was planted at the root of the wall, and it grew so well that it climbed on the ginkgo tree.
In today's shop, old furniture and plants are kings. The 300-square-meter space is divided into a reading room, a showroom, a café, a bar and a courtyard. The word "rice ground" is hung on the light box at the door and on the rammed earth wall. Rice land, there is rice and land, the land is fertile, and the Yi language is a transliteration of "very good".
Rice House officially opened on April 30, 2022. The opening day was very lively, the good friends Wild Children Band drove 500 kilometers from Dali to Xichang, spread out two large parasols in the yard, lit the lights, and sang songs all night.
"My spiritual home. At the beginning of December 2023, on an afternoon when the store was closed on Tuesday, Moxizishi sat in the courtyard and looked around, "I could sit here for three days and three nights." ”
As he said, it is indeed a spiritual home, a small courtyard of its own, carefully built. In the reading room, there are books donated by friends from all walks of life, a dim light in the exhibition room, illuminating musical instruments such as mouth strings, kesi bamboo, taubshuer, drums and other small objects, and there are records and magazines in the café, as well as brochures and ticket stubs of the FIRST Youth Film Festival, Golden Rooster International Film Festival, and Pingyao International Film Festival. In the past two years, Moxizishi has participated in the filming of three films, "Broken Bridge", "Mistake by the River", and "Tent with Colored Balls", playing the role of a pedantic bridge designer, a sanctimonious poetry lover, and a beekeeper who lives after flowers.
The rice land is quiet, the books are not few, and the sun in the yard is good, but it is inevitable that the common problem of today's bookstores, "There are not many people who read books, and there are many people who Xi, so they work quietly there, or prepare for graduate school." The words "Wasteland Phonograph" are framed and placed prominently in the reading room, and the walls are full of picture books that are mostly unattended.
Sitting in the courtyard of the rice field, you can hear the sound of the torch square outside, some of which are tuned for the evening performance, and some of which are the background music of the market stalls that are looping to attract customers, the so-called folk popular music.
Sometimes Moxizi also wonders if Nianzi's hometown for so many years is a sweet dream that only exists when he is not here. Once it comes true, it's comfortable, but it's also boring.
"When I really came back to this place, I found that there are many, many of these ...... in this place" He thought about it, for example, people often call him to drink and chat, but he is allergic to alcohol and doesn't like to talk very much, "The occasion of drinking is too high, I am not used to it, and the way I get high is to go to the wild." ”
In December 2023, the 5th Daliangshan Theater Festival will be held in Xichang, which is a little lively. "But the festival only happens once a year. Usually it is basically a small town way of life, with very little foreign things. I would go back to my comfort zone, where it was easy to get lazy and I thought it was terrible. For example, when I was in Beijing, my mind was always in a state of rotation, but when I got here, I felt as if I couldn't turn it anymore. ”
Trying to make Midi a place where young people who are constantly going out can live when they return, and a space for the preservation of the traditional culture of the Yi nationality also shows that they are not enough. "This is a very remote place, and the remoteness means that culturally, it is much farther away than Yunnan. There is no way for the local culture to flow to other lands, and it is stagnant here. Five years ago, Mo Xizishi mentioned that many children don't speak Yi anymore, and now he said that it is difficult for people who can make traditional musical instruments to make a living from this, and most of them still go out to work. There are few people who learn, and more importantly, after learning, they have to become their own things, which can take root and sprout in different places. ”
The road gives the tree a road, and the road makes the tree have no road. Photographed in Xichang Daqing Russian Dove Dam Photo/Mo Xizi poem
After 2020, when Mo Xizishi moved back to Xichang from Beijing, she was delighted to see the gap, but also frustrated that she felt as if she was not a good manager, unable to curate, take care of the store, and even place every tree consistently. Everyday life is occupied by trivial matters that do not distinguish between priorities and priorities.
It should not be forgotten that his main business is making music, and during this time, he has to record a audition for a new film soundtrack, prepare a performance playlist, and revise the text part of the photo book "Children of Nature". In addition, I have to worry about the direction of the next album, whether it is folk or pure music or a band album. "I'm still struggling with these few. He scratched his head, and there was another problem that still bothered him - he clearly saw that the Yi things on his body were too heavy, and he thought that if possible, he would leave here again and collide with more things.
In the shuttle back and forth
When I was in elementary school, because everyone didn't speak Chinese, even though the teachers in Daqing Township, Xichang City, taught in Chinese and the students answered simply in Chinese, Mo Xizishi and the other children still spoke Yi. In junior high school, he went to Liangshan Prefecture Nationalities Middle School and found that he was surrounded by classmates who spoke Chinese well, and he would be made fun of if he didn't speak well. Mo Xizi's Yi tone is very heavy, and he doesn't dare to speak.
One day he was sitting on the campus and saw three long-haired youths sitting on the grass on the dirt bike, playing the piano and singing. What he saw was the "Golden Silk Bird" choir. The following year, they became an instant hit and became the most popular Yi pop music group at the time, and the vice governor named them the Mountain Eagle Group, the totem of the Yi people. Yi musicians mostly use traditional instruments and sing a cappella, but the mountain eagle group plays the guitar and sings harmony, and Mo Xizishi feels that his eyes are bright.
He and his classmates followed the guitarist every day, clamoring to learn, and each person played for a few minutes before it was the next one. He also went to buy records and CDs with the words "Beijing", "Universal" and "Jingwen" written on them.
"So I think it wasn't by accident that I went to Beijing later," Mo Xizishi said, "There are always unknown things, so you are born and always have to go outside, of course, each individual is different, but most people are born to see it." ”
But at that time, he didn't think about becoming a musician. After graduating from university, he went to Shanghai, going back and forth between his residence and the company every day, and went to Xujiahui on weekends, but he never even went to the Bund. Xujiahui owns the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and he bought his first guitar at a piano shop on Fenyang Road. In general, the state of life is more like "hovering on the edge". I heard that there were many music festivals in Beijing, so a year later he quit his job and went north to work as a teacher in a kindergarten and a tour guide in the Drum Tower area.
"At that time, we were still doing 'group performances'. In the evening, Mo Xizishi bought two roasted buds, and we stood on the side of the road while nibbling and chatting about things in Beijing, he said that when he first went to Beijing, "it was not a group performance, or someone got married, and it was in the form of eight sedan chairs in the Qing Dynasty, so we wore that kind of clothes to carry the sedan chair and make up the number of people." 20 dollars a day. Then sprinkle a handful of sugar, all fighting and grabbing, as if they had never seen sugar in their lives. It's pitiful to think about it now. After a while, he added, "But at that time, I felt that I was working hard outside, and I never felt bitter." ”
After the "group performance", everyone took a minibus home, and the woman in the same car said that she had been in Beijing for five years. At that time, Mo Xizishi felt that five years was a long time, and he only planned to stay for a year, earn 20,000 yuan, and then go home to open a store.
"I was living in the basement. Zifeng also remembered these things, he and Mo Xi Zishi knew each other because they had both sung in a bar in Xichang, and after retiring from the army, he also went to Beijing, and the two got together again to be a "group performer", "The signal in the basement is not very good, it has a small window, but it is relatively high, so every time I step on the bed and stretch my mobile phone to that window, there is a little signal." ”
Outside of work, the two of them ride bicycles around. Once, after riding all day, from Madian Bridge to the villages of Changping and Huairou, the villagers saw them, "I think we are quite strange, a bit like from the city, but they have become countrymen." Zifeng said with a smile.
Or go to suburban reservoirs and rivers to swim, climb mountains, and dig for old things on the roadside - Zifeng throws them away every time he moves, and Moxi Zishi piles up these old things, "Happiness lies in relaxation, and it is quite free." ”
A year later, instead of returning home to open a store, he stayed in Beijing for 14 years. Zifeng will go home for the New Year every year, but Mo Xi may not return for two or three years, "Beijing is very far away from Xichang, just like another country." Zifeng touched the guitar when he saw that he was free, and often sang and cried to himself. "Later, the recording was the same, singing and singing, and when I came out of the recording studio, the door opened, and I was still wiping my tears. ”
In 2009, Moxizi Shi and Zifeng formed the band "Two Copper Skins". Moxi often carries a Yi harmonica, which is composed of two copper skins, and the duo is convenient to travel and comfortable and primitive.
At the beginning, every time Zifeng warmed up with suona, rubbed his hands warm, and moistened the reed, he didn't say "huh-", and when he came out, it was the tone of the wedding and funeral. Moxi said, can you blow something different? Zifeng just got through at one point, pulled out the suona reed and the letter, and blew directly at the suona rod, the sound became smaller and softer, and it looked much more restrained.
"He doesn't like to be too conventional, we're all the same. Later, we re-play all musical instruments with our own understanding, just like children play with toys, how to play and how to sound good, no matter what is defined or what is already there, we don't care, it is not within the framework. Zifeng said, "The love of nature, studying these trees, flowers and plants, is actually related to music." ”
In 2010, the Yi New Year event was held in the auditorium of Minzu University of China. The band "Two Pieces of Copper" came to the stage and sang "Knowing It's Only Called for Three Days". Zifeng played the mouth strings, a traditional instrument of the Yi people, and Moxizi sang Yi lyrics.
It was at this Yi annual party that Guoji Yixin first met Moxizi's poems. "There's an experimental side to his music, and it's a hometown side to that occasion, and it's amazing that two things come together. ”
That is to say, when he arrived in Beijing, Mo Xizishi began to write and sing songs in Yi language, and he heard from others that he sang Yi songs very well, and then he reacted: Is this my merit? The songs he sang at the Yi New Year party were later included in the album "Dream of Black Eagle" by the Mountain Eagle Group's Waqiyihe, and his singing voice, which he thought was not beautiful, was considered to be full of original beauty, and his Yi dialect, which was reduced year by year, would no longer be ridiculed, but was a simple and national identity.
In 2014, 36-year-old Mo Xizishi became popular for singing "If You Want to Die, You Must Die in Your Hands" in the "Good Songs of China" program. In the same year, the first album "Wilderness" was released. Four years later, he released his second album "Moonlight is White". His creation is close to poetry, the rhythm of the Yi epic, the tone, and the musical instrument performance are very similar to the rhythm of the poem, and the poem and the Yi language are his physical experience, and he is also close to nature, and there is loneliness, sadness, and happiness in the singing of nature and his hometown.
In 2014, Mo Xizishi (first from left) and Zheng Jun (second from left) sang together in the program "Good Songs of China" Photo/Visual China
In the sequence of the development of modern music of the Yi nationality, Moxizi's poems can be classified as the third generation. After the Liangshan Song and Dance Troupe's exploration of modern artistic expression, the use of the concept and production form of pop music by the Shanying Group and Yi Manufacturing, the new generation of Yi musicians, including Mo Xizishi, consciously want to try more cultural styles, such as Ji Jie's use of jazz and soul music in the album "From the Depths", while Mo Xi chooses more folk songs, and more importantly, these are not shoe-like stuffing, but fusion.
In December 2023, it was snowing in Beijing, and the night before, Moxizishi and his bandmates were preparing to fly to Beijing for an event. The band took shape when he toured in 2014, and after several moves, it is now fixed at five members, but because they are scattered in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi'an and other places, they only meet once or twice a month. Zifeng is the one who has known Moxi Zishi the longest here, "Moxi is more widely accepted, he used to have a dream of an electroacoustic band, especially thinking about folk rock, which was his dream when he drifted north." And now he gives me the feeling of relief or relief, no longer clinging to a certain form. ”
"Why have we been going to the universe for so many years, launching satellites and exploring all kinds of things?" still standing on the side of the street and nibbling on the bud for a while, Mo Xizishi said, "I think it's actually us looking for ourselves, I think so." It's like I've run so many laps before I start to find myself, and I realized that creating in my native language is quite suitable for me, and I feel that I can continue to grow old and die, which I would never have thought of before. ”
Valley Echo's last official event was at the end of 2020, when they held a co-creation exhibition in Wangjing, Beijing. Out of the familiarity and strangeness of their hometown of Liangshan in a foreign land, they launched a call for creations about Liangshan from everyone. The young people of Liangshan, they go out and return, and in the shuttle back and forth, they explore the relationship between their hometown and the outside world, their own identity and the outside world.
"Liangshan is a huge net. Yiluo said, "The attachment to the mountains and rivers of my hometown, traditional culture and concepts, have always recycled me and pulled me back to the situation of Liangshan." My life and Xi outside brought me into another operating logic. When I encounter confusion outside, I miss the grass and trees in my hometown, my relatives and the warmth they bring me, but in my hometown, there is no way to satisfy some of my inner thoughts, and I need to go outside to find more possibilities. This net is invisible, both a force for me to move forward and something that binds me at the same time, a dynamic state. ”
The genius of the ritual
Wei Mingde, a French scholar who visited Liangshan twice a year from 1995 to 2007 for two to three months at a time, called the Yi "ritual geniuses."
"The art of Nuosu (the largest group of the Yi people, such as Moxizi's poems) is inseparable from the expression of religious rituals, and has never intended to survive forever, but only to spend some painful stages of life in this form. Wei Mingde writes that whether it is death or artistic creation, "the common expression is to show the way and guide how to wade through the water"; (Death) is actually a funeral creation that indicates the 'white road' (the path of the soul to the ancestral realm), through which the deceased will be reunited with their ancestors. ”
This white road appears in the first song of Moxizi's first album, "Mandrill", in which the ghosts of the night lure people to take the black road and deviate from the white road. What Moxizi's poem wants to choose is this white road.
has been acting in the past two years, and he often brings this trait he yearns for to the role. The role he wants to play in "The Mistake by the River" Wang Hong seems to be honest, but he actually wants to get rid of his lover, but he is unwilling, and feels that this person is "obscene". Later, when he heard that he could act in his own way, he always found some advantages for Wang Hong in his heart, so that he could be worthy of the girl's liking.
So in the first scene where Wang Hong appeared, in a long shot of a blurred and unclear human face, a poet-loving worker was reading poetry in the auditorium, because the accent caused laughter, Mo Xizishi said in his slightly changed lines and tone: "I think the use of dialect is very good in this passage just now, poetry is a very serious and pure thing, that is, to face yourself sincerely." Director Wei Shujun also said that because of his sincerity, when he has such a relationship and wants to get rid of it, the escape itself seems convincing.
The night before the interview, Mo Xizishi went to see the play "A Thousand Miles to Ride Alone" with her relatives and friends. It was a one-man puppet show, more than 20 puppets of different forms under the traction of actor Hong Jindiao to perform a story, with Hong Jindiao himself learning from a teacher, practicing meditation and resigning from public office from Quanzhou to Shenzhen and performing for children in welfare homes along the way, connecting several marionettes, bag puppets, stick puppets, iron branch puppets and shadow puppet performances, including one of the classic plays, "A Thousand Miles to Ride Alone".
Mo Xizishi said that after reading it, he secretly shed tears in the audience.
"If a person can always follow his heart's preferences and go on a path, I think this is a very 'right' thing. He talked about Hu Jinquan's "Chivalrous Girl" that he had watched many times, "How can it be filmed so well, just like that puppet show, the loyalty and courage of the ancients are filmed, and I feel that there is still true love in the world." Because in real life, sometimes it will be numb, and now the information is too fragmented, people will be a little erratic, so movies like "Chivalrous Girl" and yesterday's puppet shows, this kind of thing can give people warmth and medicine at the same time, and make people sober up. ”
"I yearn for something, or I think it's right, that something like this will be so ...... Then there is a sense of ritual. He agrees with another word used by another audience member to evaluate the whole play and the actors, "craftsman."
Moxizi's poems are in the Midi Book House, and on the wall is the reflection of poetry and tequila Photo/Meng Yiyi, a reporter from Southern People Weekly
Later, after we finished the interview, and walked out of the rice field, Moxizishi turned back to close the glass sliding door, and when she walked out again, she showed a look of happiness and contentment, and said, "It's good to open a bookstore, isn't it? ”
Southern People Weekly reporter Meng Yiyi
Editor-in-charge: Yang Jingru