Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Rethinking the Revolution




The sun is just coming up.  Outside there is one bird singing.  I know its call, which is odd.  If I was Gershwin, whom I wrote about yesterday, I could probably write down the notes and the timing.  There are three steady notes, a dip and then a staccato repetition of six notes, much faster that follow.  It’s odd because I’ve never been in San Diego before and have no affinity whatsoever for local birds. This is a bird or the cousin of a bird that I’ve heard all the time as a kid.  It stands out because I never hear this bird, in Beijing.  Perhaps it is a some robin or oriel or family of such that spans the whole of North America, but never made it to Eurasia.  I must ask my stepfather.  He will know. 

The other sound in the distance is also very familiar to my American ears and, at least where I live in Beijing, not as pronounced: the sound of the highway.  The steady drone, of the freeway.   Far enough away so as not to dominate, if you’re not paying attention.  But impossible to ignore if you are quite and concentrate.  It hums steadily like some churning in your arteries that carries on all the time and is such a constant that one is oblivious.  But I think that sound is working on me and all of us, within earshot of the freeway, fastening us to modernity. 



My sister has published a wonderful book that I finished on the flight over.  “Revolutionary” by Alex Myers traces the story of a Revolutionary War era servant who flees from her home when attacked and manages to successfully disguise herself as a man and join the Revolutionary Army.   It is a fictional account of the a real revolutionary war figure, Deborah Samson to whom the author, who is himself transgender, is a distant relative, a descendent of this fascinating woman.   He renders her as smart, plausible and astutely 随机应变[1].

Writing earlier in the year I mentioned how readily I dismiss the eighteenth century period as comparatively dull to what proceeded and followed.  And that I thought this had something to do with the way in which we were over-taught the Revolutionary War back at the bicentennial back when I was ten, in 1976.  Well- intentioned teachers brought us to mock farms that showed us what life was like and it all seemed rather cloistered and unfortunate.  Movies like Barry Lyndon didn’t do anything to help that perception. 

But Mr. Myers book, set as it is in my beloved Hudson Valley, does wonders to reclaim the period for me.  So Westchester was a hot bed of loyalism.  And the Hudson struck people coming down from Massachusetts and Connecticut as mighty.  And, surprise, beneath the Puritan rhetoric people were lusty and confused and opportunistic.  The Revolutionary War is probably as exotic for my daughters as the Qing Dynasty was when I grew up.  I can’t assume that it is more or less dull or exciting than any other historical epoch.  But I think I will have my older one read this tale and see what she thinks.  It will be easy enough to visit West Point or Yorktown, after the fact. 



The post-free jazz trumpet player Roy Campbell was born two hours up that freeway from where I am just now, in LA in 1952.  And he passed, just this January, I’ve learned, back not far from where Deborah Samson fought her battles, below Westchester, in The Bronx.  I’ve got a feisty 1994 recording on just now called “La Tierra Del Fuego Suite” from an album of the same name. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/arts/music/roy-campbell-jr-avant-garde-jazz-trumpeter-dies-at-61.html

Just last January.  What a shame to have missed this gentleman. I’ll be in San Francisco this weekend.  It reminds me to go and see who I can catch, the in the Bay where live jazz still happens.




[1] suíjīyìngbiàn:  to change according to the situation (idiom); pragmatic

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