My
God it is lovely to sit in New York City and watch all the people roll by. It reminds me of what remarkable
training this city is all who have the good fortune to live here. If it doesn’t make you bitter, it
leaves you more limber than is possible anywhere else in this big country to
accept cultural relativism.
Clearly this place doesn’t belong to anyone. Who’d dare claim it for themselves? And everyone does.
Digging all these different faces I am. No dearth of young people that look
Chinese or make me wonder if perhaps a person is Korean. Thinking about the slave trade from
Angola to Brazil and how that must have left a different cultural, phenotypic
legacy for if my history serves the vast majority of the Americans who survived
the Middle passage came from the Bight of Benin. A woman who looked Indian just darted by. The tall kid cutting by just adjusted him yarmulke.
The Caribbean beams back at you over and over from oddly familiar sets
of piercing, 双瞳剪水[1]
ojos. The IrishItalianPolishPuertoRican looking iconic New York
City cops sitting outside the Lower Manhattan Precinct. Bankers and Broadway
types, fat, harried, commuters who wish they weren’t. Is there anywhere else so worthy of its self importance?
I think this way, I prioritize this way, because I’m from
here and because I live in a place that reinforces my otherness every day of my
life. I can never be Chinese and
regardless of language or learning I will be other for as long as I stay. If acculturation is central to the
American dream this is the master furnace. And my fantasy New York of cultural bonhomie is easy to drop
in and sample for a day, without all the endless counter factuals that make you
curse the place when you live here.
Still, it remains the city-state I’m most proud to hail from and return to.
I have a continuing process to check out each album the
phenomenal New Orleans drummer who sounds so much like he came up in the same
soil as Ziggy Modeliste, the one Idris Muhammad. His Wiki page has all the albums he ever played on listed, including
dozens of session from the period I seem to like most in the laste sixties,
early seventies. The albums of
Reuben Williams he plays on from those years are phenomenal. In 1971 he played on the album of a
woman Bobbi Humphrey whom I wasn’t familiar with. A flautist with a commanding fro, Rido had some selections
but not the one with Mssr. Muhammad called “Flute In.” Youtube did and I’ve got it on
now. And while it is undeniably
groovy and a fitting accompaniment to all these New Yorkers darting around
outside, Idris does not seem to be driving anything particularly
expansive. I’m more caught up by
the conga player Ray Armondo who’d adding all the tasty fills I’m catching.
Bobbi’s blowing away on Lee Morgan’s “Sidewinder” just now and
come to look and the baby-faced Mr. Morgan is actually on this 1971 session. Fabulous. I’ll listen that much more closely. Pause. What year?
Check and yes. Mr. Morgan
would be dead within four month’s of this recording, shot in the head by his
wife, while he was performing a some forty blocks south and eight blocks east
of here.
I mentioned in the previous post that the official,
coordinated vilification of Zhou Yong Kang is underway in China. My wife explained that the news all
out, and set to a fever pitch. I
checked the Times to see if they might be commenting on the fact that the “Two
Minute Hate” session had been officially launched. Clearly neither the Zhou story itself, which broke eight months
ago, nor the choreography of hate merited anything worth consideration. The only “China” story on the front
page concerned a commitment to synthetics by China’s largest bear bile
producer. http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/research-plan-on-bear-bile-medicine-is-hailed-by-animal-activists/?_php=true&_type=blogs&hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpBlogHeadline&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
My family will be down in Grand Central in an hour. I think I will take my girls over to
the MoMA and explain to them once again why I love this city so.
No comments:
Post a Comment