The air quality was
rated “very unhealthy” yesterday. I
think I can feel it. Today we’re down to
“unhealthy.” Take a deep breath. The sun looked malevolent, confrontational, as it rose in the
December sky, fat, hazy, rusty off above the trees from the second floor window
of the gym. Across the street is the lot
between this villa complex and another.
I’ve commented on it as the land where nothing grows. Five years now and the vegetation has yet to
return. Here’s what I wrote a year ago
about it in “7DS”:
Outside the main gate and across
the way is an abandoned field, surrounded by purposed, pointy, conifer bushes
to block the view. From the main road
there are high walled billboards that also seal off the scenery with posters of
dreamy villa life: a private pool, a misty mountain view. Behind the billboard, and the conifers,
inside the lot, nothing grows. I’ve
been here for four years now and the scrub forest has never returned. There has to be something toxic in the
ground. There must be. Why is nothing growing?
The question remains.
Now it appears that are plowing it down, running it over.
It is prime real estate.
Presumably we’ll have a new version of luxury living on these grounds
before long, like the one in the distance.
I really wonder though, why nothing sprouts up over there. Land left alone for years should rejuvenate,
unless their is something wrong. Appropriately,
perhaps, it is the Dead Boys who great me for the first tune on the stair
master. Looking over the dead field, I
consider Stiv Bators, the lead singer, watching people from his room, in the
song, “Sonic Reducer.”
The Cleveland Catholic School boys who moved to New York on
Joey Ramone’s suggestion and helped define the late seventies punk scene there.
They’d broken up by the time I was seeing shows at CB’s in 1981. I always remember one remarkable anecdote of
theirs narrated by their comparatively sober, ironic bass player Jeff Magnum
about how their drummer Johnny Blitz had yelled something confrontational to a
carload of Puerto Rican guys driving by on the Bowery. Mr. Magnum had apparently counseled Mr. Blitz
that this not wise and provoke this car load of youths, but Mr. Magnum
proceeded, undeterred. Not surprisingly
the car returned and a rather lopsided battle ensued that left Johnny Blitz
hospitalized with his chest stabbed. I
believe Jeff’s comment in the Legs McNeil book “Please Kill Me” was “didn’t
your mother, didn't someone teach you not to provoke a car load full of Puerto Rican
teens?” Indeed.
“Sonic Reducer” is of course, the metaphor for the band. “I got my time machine. Got my electronic train.” And that had me back in New York. Now it turns out that the Metro North train
took the hard left there at Spuyten Duyvil, what is effectively a ninety-degree
angle, doing 83 M.P.H. Damn. I didn’t know that Metro North trains were
capable of doing 83 M.P.H in a straight-away.
The recommended speed for the turn is 30 M.P.H. As Governor Cuomo said: “there were
three possible causes for the accident: the condition of the tracks, an
equipment failure or human error.” For
that engineer’s sake, I hope door number one or door number two. By the way, where has Mayor Bloomberg been?
Returning to this question of Air Defense, the
Times made an interesting suggestion today that Xi Jin Ping has not,
historically cultivated much of any outreach to Japan. He’s visited there and received delegations,
but has had much less dealings with his neighbors, than say the disgraced party
leader Bo Xi Lai. What the Times didn’t
say was whether or not Shinzo Abe had spent much of any time getting to know
China. One presumes he had some
experience during his brief, first term in power. But has he done more than made an obligatory
visit or two to this country, during his rise to power? As I suggested before, both men bear the
legacy of fathers (and in Abe’s case, grandfather) who ruled before them, governing as they must beneath their and the all shadows of the last century.
What would have happened if China
reached out quietly to the U.S. and announced that this was their
intention? Perhaps they did, though I doubt it. Perhaps they would have
rightly assumed that the U.S. would not have treated the information carefully,
would immediately leak it to Japan, etc.
One can understand that a rising power isn’t always graceful as it goes
about upending the status quo. But there
is potential to do more than surprise with assertions that seem petulant with
their abruptness. China should risk an
effort to try more confidence building with the information it has and how it
is shared. Right now the nation's remains bereft of real allies. Otherwise no one will see the
emerging giant as something to trust and the noise back from the world, will serve to make China that much more bristly and people will assume the worst of your rise, as if your intentions are really no better then the Dead Boys:
Things will be different then
The sun will rise from here
Then I'll be ten feet tall
And you'll be nothing at all.
Meanwhile, if America wants creative, and risky olive branches from Beijing, it might consider how best to model such behavior first. All the more so, for Japan. Simply insisting upon the status quo is not defensible for the medium term.
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