Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Embassy Job





Someone is flying in to Beijing today.  The old ritual repeats itself.  I will go and meet this person.  It is a business meeting.  The person has been to Beijing before.  This sort of treatment is neither necessary nor expected.  And this sort of treatment will unlikely be repeated for this individual in the future.  But for the “first” time, someone comes for meetings you’ve set up, you ought to go an meet them if you can. I can’t imagine anyone ever doing that in Tokyo.  Narita’s too far and so is Incheon in South Korea.  And it’s not just the distance.  The assumption as well is that those cities are reasonably easy to get around in.  “You’ll be fine.”  Here, the old fashioned courtesy, and the assumption of local complexity, continues. 

Last night sat outside and ate.  Haven’t been able to do that here for quite some time.  An old friend on the San Li Tun bar street.  The one section, up by the embassies that is still reminiscent of what it used to be.  There is a Middle Eastern place with a Chinese chef who serves up descent kebabs and hummus.  The owner is from Lanzhou, in Gansu.  I told him I hadn’t been there in 17 years.  He mentioned that it had changed.  He wanted to know if we could get him a day job and an embassy.  Nextdoor is an informal wine bar.  You can bring the bottles from the one over to a table at the other and enjoy reasonable wine at store, rather than restaurant prices.   And, on a Wednesday night that place was packed with young Chinese people who seemed to be all about drinking wine, on the street, under the stars.  As always: 杯酒解怨[1]



I’ve got the California tenor player Harold Land on just now, mournful, assertive “You Don’t Know What Love Is.”   Earlier at the gym the random mode kept throwing on so many Kinks tunes I thought the random feature was turned off.  Then an old reggae cut came on that I didn’t recognize at first.  Beautiful rhythm guitar and then the open break.  Ahh, yes, “Fire Down Below” by Burning Spear.  This seemed like an earlier version than any I’d heard before.  It appears to come from a Studio One recording from 1973 but may have been earlier.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_One_Presents_Burning_Spear

I can easily recall the first time I’d heard them on their seminal dub album “Garvey’s Ghost" driving around town in the jeep of an older friend, who’d returned to our high school, my senior year.  He proudly referred to it as his favorite album and though it was quite different from anything I’d ever heard before, I respected his taste and I was instantly drawn in.  Later that summer a friend an I left his West 87th St. apartment early one morning got the subway to the LIRR to the ferry to Fire Island where my dad had rented a home that week and plopped down on the beach and listened to that album and concurred that it was meant to be listened to on the beach, with the waves crashing.

Crashing waves have, for now, called off the search for the ill-fated Malaysian airliner.  The additional radar information the directed the search teams to the south west of Australia did not, as I postulated, come from the U.S., but rather from the U.K.  The Aussie in charge of the rescue had the telling comment:  “We are not looking for a needle in a haystack, we are looking for the haystack.”  Here in town, family of the victims had no such trouble finding the Malaysian Embassy, where they broke through police to stage a protest.   Presumably this is not the best embassy for my man from Gansu to inquire about work. 



Finally, I’m glad to see Michelle, if not Sasha and Mellia are having a good time here.  Michelle looks remarkable in the NY Times photo of her practicing Tai Chi.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/26/world/asia/michelle-obama-mixes-some-politics-into-china-trip.html?hp
Apparently the girls are a bit tired.  I can only imagine the press corp following me and my kids as we toured temples. “The looked really bored and groaned with their father insisted on one more temple.”   Peng Liyuan looks hip, but poor Xi Jinping almost can’t help but look stiff in the photo they have of them all together (fourth one down.) as if being in that job necessarily adjusts one’s posture to become more like Jiang Zemin. 
  







[1] bēijiǔjiěyuàn:  a wine cup dissolves complaints (idiom); a few drinks can ease social interaction   

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