“The worst system
except for all the others,” was on full display back home. The kindergarten infamy of party politics,
back in the Tri State area now exposed. Chris
Christie’s staff willfully closed all but one entrance to the George Washington
Bridge because the local mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sokolich, a Democrat, wouldn’t
endorse Christie who was heavily favored to win, anyway. The mayor, who is of Croatian descent, was
derisively referred to a “Little Serb.”
All the emails of Christie aides like Bridget Anne Kelly, who looks like
a dozen people I grew up with, have been subpoenaed.
Willful aggravation to thousands of commuters, people with
health risks, children waiting for their parents all put at risk, countless hours
of work wasted. Small on the one hand,
compared to say warfare, but callous and raw to think that is legitimate fare, for political retribution. Fuck with local people, make them angry, so they don't vote for the local guy and pretend you knew nothing. No different at all really to the
brute, venal abuse of power so common in my favorite one party state. Someone in power 恃强欺弱[1]
Christie may be able to prove he had nothing to do with it,
but this will certainly compromise his presidential chances. Now he says he’s “disgusted.” You should be. Shame on these bullies who behaved that
way. They shouldn’t just loose their jobs. They should go to jail. Better still, take away their drivers licenses and make them ride the public busses for the next decade. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/09/nyregion/christie-aide-tied-to-bridge-lane-closings.html?hpw&rref=politics
A man who knew a thing or two about New Jersey politics
passed today, there in New Jersey, Amiri Baraka, (a.k.a. Leroi Jones). http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Activist-poet-playwright-Amiri-Baraka-dies-at-79-5128653.php#page-1 Forever incendiary, confrontational, lyrical,
he was born in the same town as Chris Christie, there in Newark. Reading back over his artistic and
intellectual progression and of the many of the things attributed to him it is
easy to find fault and take exception.
But it is also appropriate to remember fierce courage required in that
time to change the dreadful weight of institutional racism and make sense of
something like the Newark riots of 1967 which were apparently the catalyst that
radicalized the then Mr. Jones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Newark_riots
I had the good fortune of seeing Amiri Baraka speak and read
when I was a student at Wesleyan University.
I remember him asking people in the audience where they were from and
warming when two young men said they were from Newark. He did not read from nor express the
sentiment of his 1965 poem "Black Art." “We need poems that kill. . . Assassin
poems. Poems that shoot guns/Poems that wrestle cops into alleys/and take their
weapons leaving them dead/with tongues pulled out and sent
to Ireland." This was twenty
years on from that time.
But he did read something that I remember, to this day,
called “Anti Reagan.” It built, as I recall (alas, I can not find a copy quickly
on line this morning) a sound, shattering case as to why all reasonable minds
should be opposed to that, then, current presidency. The title was repeated, over and over chant-like
till, by the end, you wanted only but to join him in shouting, “Anti Reagan,
Anti Reagan.” This was back in 1985 or
so, when people still wore tee shirts saying “Libyan Hit Squad. Where’s Reagan?”, before all the sorry
hagiography transferred the Gipper and his presidency into something worthy of
having an airport named after it.
How hard it must have been to talk with, to reason with Amiri
Baraka when he was on fire. But that
wasn’t the point and he wasn’t afraid.
He was committed not necessarily to truth, but to courage and impulse
and the disruptive potential of words and to something more just. What will the
next version of generational incendiary insistence take the form of, when it
grabs my forty, fifty, sixty something lapels and spits in my face?
Born only five months prior to Amiri Baraka, right there in
Newark was the man who graces the room now in which I write. I have some Wayne Shorter blowing tenor from
1961 on the standard “All or Nothing At All” and he sounds mighty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Shorter
I first got heavily into everything
Wayne Shorter ever recorded, back in the late nineties, the first time I lived
in Beijing. I had “Speak No Evil” and “JuJu” and most of stuff he’d done with
Miles. I was never a big fan of the
later, Weather Report stuff, but perhaps I just need to have it properly
curated. I prefer his tenor playing to
what he did with the soprano sax.
Back in those fin de siècle
days there was basically nowhere in Beijing to get jazz and there was
certainly no Rdio. (though soon, there would be Napster.) But at one point during 1998 someone turned
me on to little store in Xidan that brought jazz CDs in from Hong Kong and had
them available for sale. It was pricey,
as they weren’t knock offs but the novelty of having it accessible in Beijing, to
go shopping for jazz, was remarkable.
And one day I was riding home to JiaoDaoKou from work on the west side
near ZiZhuYuan and I bought what was to become my favorite Wayne Shorter album,
which I’ve put on now to enjoy, “Adam’s Apple.”
Recorded two months before my birth, in February of 1966,
right there in, of course, Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New
Jersey, a few miles from where I was gestating, preparing to emerge, into a New
Jersey hospital. In the Beijing of 1999,
I rode a bike all over town and I listened to “Adam’s Apple” over and over and
fell in love with it in a way that sometimes can only happen when you discover
music in a certain place and time and absorb it frequently out within that
atmosphere. Listening now, I can remember the tenor of that time in my life,
newly married, newly employed, no children, no crystal ball.
I think that is the Beijing I loved, with that Wayne Shorter
soundtrack and those endless dusty hutongs that lay waiting to be explored and
destroyed. That evocation drew me back here
this time I think, and is why I remain now, even though I never get to enjoy
that version of Dongcheng or Xidan, which like me, has changed forever.
My parents moved from Northern New Jersey back to New York
six month’s after I was born. That is where they both hailed from anyway and
New Jersey had just a brief two year starter abode for the young newlyweds. I lived all my life in New York
and associate myself as being from there.
But listening to Wayne Shorter on the day after Amiri Baraka’s death,
considering Chris Christie’s political suicide, I’ll pay homage to and claim a
bit of New Jersey.
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