Old
friends over. Two young boys
roughly the same age as my girls, in town, staying with us. One of them wanted to share with me a
comedian he was into. He cued me
up with a long, live session of a gent named Gabriel Iglesias in Hawaii. I was
open to being impacted. But it
was, to my sensibilities, all rather flat. The production was enormous, as if he’d obviously long since
made it. The audience of beautiful
people were properly guffawing, on cue.
But it wasn’t the least bit dangerous. It wasn’t funny.
Of course, once the water had been tainted with the bloody
chum of comedic potential, I needed real meat. “Have you ever heard of Bill Hicks?” I don’t know what the right age is for
all this, but they may as well taste something substantive. If found a clip of him up on Montreal
and watched along as he did some classic material about the first Gulf War and
the first President Bush. Then I
found a full-length clip of him bits of which I’ve seen before from when he
must have been about seventeen, which was less uproarious but probably more
approachable for people not much younger than Hicks was himself.
Somehow calls were made later for “The Life of Brian” which
I could not resist. My daughters
have seen it a few times, but it was new for these boys and despite my reciting
lines aloud I think everyone had a good time. Topically, at night, before a jet lagged return to nod, I
continued my read of Saramago’s “The Gospels According to Jesus Christ”, which
is another man’s mockery of Christ’s brief life. It occurred to me amidst all this ironic ridicule that while
its wonderful to 别开生面[1], I should probably better acquaint
myself with the seminal text itself.
Frank Lowe is a tenor sax player from Tennessee who played
with Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane and later moved out to San Francisco. I’ve something from 1974 on called
“Fresh” a year later than Sly’s “Fresh” was released, it occurs to me. The song is called “Play Some Blues”
and he’s ripping it up with Lester Bowie.
I searched him out, from a series of suggested links from Odean
Pope. The links from his earlier
band Catalyst were all leading me to these fusion-y bands that I approached
with an open mind but could listen to for very long and I didn't care to write about them. The title tune “Fresh” is challenging,
angular, and out-there, which is a far, far, better place to be then oh-yeah,
there, which is where it had been stagnating.
I first met Michael David Lampton in 1993 or so, when I was
just heading out to China as a Luce Scholar. A year or two later I was interning with him at the National
Committee of U.S. China Relations.
I saw him speak numerous times publically and he always had such a
powerful way of respectfully distilling China’s perspective and challenging
Americans without being apologetic.
Importantly, his writing has the same quality, and though I haven’t seen
him in years I catch up with his articles from time to time and am always
nourished by his clear thinking on matters I grind on every day.
This article of
his in the Center for Strategic and International Studies entitled “The US and
China: sliding from engagement to coercive diplomacy” is helpful. He suggests that the wilful disruption
of regional relations will prove disruptive economically and ultimately
unsustainable. He doesn’t make
much of the overtures to South Korea, which had caught my eye. He disregards the recent flowering of
relations with Russia as largely irrelevant for China’s long term prosperity
and stability and properly refocuses attention back to the U.S. China engagement’s
centrality.
What perhaps most caught me though, was his tone of
caution. He has been at the front
line of this exchange since the earliest days of rapprochement and if he says
that there is a substantive degradation of the relationship during the Xi
administration this is important to consider. “Since the second decade of the
21st century, the very strategic foundation of the relationship has undergone
incremental erosion – five or so years later the cumulative result is serious.” Perhaps the most important framing
matter that I found helpful was that this is not just a China issue, but rather
a redefinition of regional relationships in Asia. If Beijing wants improved relations with Washington,
which for domestic prosperity it must ultimately pursue, than it must address
improve its relations with its neighbors.
And if we are to work to address surging Chinese nationalism, we should
be careful not to stoke other regional nationalist tendencies in the
process. I hope people in the
Obama administration are also reading his work.
[1] biékāishēngmiàn:
to start sth new or original (idiom); to break a new path / to break fresh
ground
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