Heading down to Shanghai today, but not until the afternoon. I’ve got some time to be quiet and get some things done this morning Joe Albany's hammering out “Autumn in New York” as he might only do, with fits of punctuated brilliance and it almost is “making me feel, I’m home.” My smoothey glass needs refilling.
The wife has thrown on Amy Winehouse in the other room quite loudly. She sounds lovely and fragile as always. The tune, as I fill my coffee cup is, “Love Is a Loosing Game.” Purely coincidental, I assure you. We’re actually mid way through a pleasant morning. But this means Joe has to go up on to my ears through my headphones. I can work, and certainly can’t write when there are lyrics being sung. Those words, wise or insipid draw my attention and clutter my thoughts. Sheets of chords falling rain-like are patterns as with the taste of fruit in my mouth and the raspberry seeds I’m gnawing just now, one by one, color and inform my thoughts quietly as the main course of thought continues.
Another group you are not going to have on when your trying
to write is Minor Threat. They are
however a good bunch of pals to have around at the gym. “Betrayed” from the “Salad Days” EP of 1985,
came on it was grand to accelerate everything to.
I can recall being seventeen or so and sitting outside some Lower East
Side venue that was a block or two down the Bowery from CBGBs while they did
their sound check. They only had the two very important singles out then and the tracks off “Flex Your Head” and we
knew there’d be new material, but we didn’t know what to expect. I can still remember our jaws dropping
appropriately as the sound, with the calculated breaks, thundered threw the wall and we
considered what we were in for in a few hours.
Hailing from D.C. it’s hard to understate the importance of
their sound, to me and I know to many, many others, at that time. There were other bands then, which I’ve written
about here before, like Crass or the Dead Kennedys who mattered more to me,
largely because of what they had to say.
And given the unassailable, professional mastery of the Bad Brains, you
couldn’t even say that Minor Threat were the capital city’s “tightest”, “hardest”, sound
from that time. But for suburban
kids like myself, Ian MacKaye, (vocals), Jeff Nelson, (drums) Lyle Preslar (guitar) and
Brian Baker (bass), and their Dischord Records ecosystem was immediately accessible and pungently inspirational. Whatever mightier-than-though rock
stars that had commanded our attention previously were swept away with this
Do-it-Yourself epiphany. I sat in
my basement and learned all the songs and played them over and over and over on
my knock-off red Les Paul.
Like any great band I think Minor Threat just played very
well, together. During that early
80s flowering of U.S. Hardcore Punk there were no shortage of bands who were
“approachable.” “If they could do
that, we could do that” popped and popped again in hundreds of thousands of
young minds across the country in those years. It was welcoming but also, invariably competitive. And I think I probably could speak for
the majority of kids who had the same “we could do it” epiphany in saying that
making your sound as tight as Minor Threat would be a vexing height to set the
bar at. The chords, the lyrics, were
easy. Yelling was something we all
did anyway. But the way they all
sounded together, was something no one else could do.
Being invited back to the party after being thrown out, seems to be something America excels at at present. I don’t know whether to be proud, depressed or just resigned to
the fact that the Philippines now seems to have no choice but to welcome the
U.S. back, post haste. There were
many embarrassing incidents involving U.S. servicemen at the Subic Bay base, like there
have been in Okinawa. In the
post-Marcos era, the Filipino people said “enough” and asked the U.S. to
leave. We left. And now it would appear that have
little choice but to ask the devil-they-knew back because of the rising threat
they have no clear way to control, is looming across the
sea. You need at least one big
friend, even if he’s boorish, because otherwise its: 四面楚歌[1].
Have a look at this interesting Washington Post
article that discusses Obama’s recent visit to Manila:
Philippine politicians had celebrated the U.S. withdrawal.
Then-Sen. Agapito Aquino, the uncle of the country’s current president, called
it “the dawn of our nation’s birth.”
These are noble, hard earned sentiments. Finally, after centuries of Spanish Imperialism, decades of raw American imperialism, Japanese militarism, and Marcos dictatorship, the country finally
had the presence and commitment to popularly ask the nation that once
derisively referred to Filipinos as “our little brown brothers,” pack their
things and go. Twenty years later,
it simply isn’t possible to get along without some big friend behind you. If America returns, I hope we can earn
greater respect as reasonably well-behaved guests. Hegemony’s
never dainty.
Neither is tourism.
The ugly Americans, replaced by the photo-happy Japanese will all give
way now to the unruly hoards of Chinese who are sending upwards of one hundred
million people a year now overseas to explore the world. Dainty Paris doesn’t seem to know what
to do, and so in what is perhaps the shape of things to come, they have invited
the Chinese police over to help with the scams and robberies and disruptions
occurring among the waves of visitors.
French and Chinese bad guys alike seem to have figured out that Chinese
tours travel with cash and are lucrative pickings. Perhaps by this Autumn-in-New-York the NYPD will be
welcoming the Chinese gongan as well.
[1] sìmiàn Chǔgē：lit.
on all sides, the songs of Chu (idiom) / fig. surrounded by enemies, isolated
and without help
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