You Nailed It!

Shouldn’t I?  I do.  I feel sorry for Trump’s wife.  What’s her name?  I wanted to write Ivana but I knew that was a few wives back.  (The New York Post had a late eighties headline when they were divorced:  “Ivana Better Deal!” that incorrectly steers my recall.)  The front page of the Wall St. Journal is still cached on my computer.  It’s Melania:  Melania Trump.  Amidst the shambolic convention that her husband is hosting, or renting, she took the stage, and by all real-time accounts she was a measure of humanity, and immigrant humility amidst an otherwise  inflammatory war-hoop.

Say what you will about the candidate, it’s gotta be a bummer slot for just about any wife.  I can recall being repulsed by Mitt Romney but still feeling an empathic surge for his wife, when she stood up and did what she had to. Ditto for Laura Bush. And I’ve lived twenty years somewhere else.  God help you if you need to stand up and sway an entire nation in a non-native tongue.  And she did what she had to.  She didn’t drop the ball.   She humanized her husband. 

Her husband wrote “The Art of the Deal” which propelled his career.  The gent who ghosted it has now come out to say how sorry he is for his authorship of so much mendacious and, of late, influential nonsense.  Donald of course maintains that he wrote it.  “It’s my book.”  And with his double-speak default means of communicating with himself and the world, no one is the least bit surprised, that Donald didn’t write it, while he maintains that he did. 

Melania offered that she had worked hard on the speech and she almost certainly practiced the delivery over and over.  But that’s different from writing.  And in this day and age we’re all empowered to fact check things in real-time:  Someone between jobs, who should be hired by the New York Times, had a hunch that he’d heard part of Melania’s speech before.  He had.  And, alas, notable portions of her heartfelt tale were lifted directly from Michelle Obama’s convention speech from a few years back. 

Trump’s campaign isn’t well managed.  Someone had told her it was “all-systems-go” and she found out the hard way that it wasn’t.   Someone will be fired.  And the Grand-Old-Meat Eaters won’t care or hold it against her husband.  But what a colossally deflating moment it must have been for her after she collapsed in her dressing room, savoring the twenty-fifth high-five moment, with texts flying in, to say:  “You nailed it Melania!  You nailed it!” . . . to learn that you’d been humiliated, used unprofessionally and are now, forever double-branded as a plagiarist who most assuredly did not author her own plagiarism.

A Thousand Lilliputian Threads

One thing led to another and I had clicked on a Danish biopic on Dexter Gordon.  Always handsome, as statuesque he as he was articulate in a slow baritone like fashion when he was a young man.  I couldn’t say if it was junk, though I suppose it was junk that weighed him down like a thousand Lilliputian threads when one catches up with him ten, fifteen years later in the clips from the eighties.  His utterances are still sensible, thoughtful, but the time it takes to complete a thought becomes unendurably long and all one can do is feel sorry for the giant. 

I can recall reading liner notes from One Flight Up, recorded in Paris in 1964, where he praises European players in general and notes the lightening fast Danish bassist Neils Henning Orsted Pederson (NHOP) in particular.   Cut to Neils-Henning and he is also young and shiny and then old and grizzled.  (You gotta be Dorian Grey to escape that one.)  But during his clip, which I assumed he’d talk about his time playing with Dex, he instead shares something very interesting about how the band leader who taught him and others a lot about discipline was Lucky Thompson, who always seemed like such an earnest voice, fated with such an unlucky trajectory. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-ScJf6hYS4

I went to a friend’s home for dinner last night.  How lucky to have friends to join up with.  I get so sick of all the many local, family style joints around here.  I got out of the cab and figured I’d go to some market and grab a bottle of wine to bring with me.  I was in the French concession so I reckoned there’d be something acceptable.  Up Ruijin Lu, down Jiangguo Lu . . . but by now I was late.  There was a super market that looked, shall we say, a bit Chinese.  I plodded and found the “wine” section and confirmed that it would absolutely not do. 

I caved and called. “Hey, where do you guys buy your wine?  I don’t want to come empty handed.”  This led to a suggestion of a place that was too far and a suggestion that I forget the whole idea.  That hadn’t been my purpose.  But perhaps I’d just throw in the towel.  Is that a florist?  That might work.  No.  It’s a laundry.   “OK.  OK.”  “Yeah, we have a bottle here already.”  “OK, am I going left or . . . hey wait. I’ll call you back.”

I passed a sliver of a place with three young guys drinking wine.  There on the wall were some boutique-like looking bottles arrayed, not for pour, but for sale.  I was looking for a rose from Provence.  They had a rose from Provence.   I’d been relieved of the responsibilities for any libations, but that wasn’t the point.  Some alignment of civility was now assuaged, as I strode out of this tiny shop, with my bottle in a rough, reused, blue cloth bag.

Day of Rest

I’m glad to review the news today and see that fortunately nothing has thus far transpired to mirror the remarkable, successive, near-miss tragedies of the last two mornings.  I am mindful that the day has a long way to go. 

I’m not used to being in this busy neighborhood on Sunday.  It is hardly rural France, where everything was closed, after a certain hour of the day.   We struggled the Sunday before last to find anywhere to eat. Even Paris where the French had once turned the Notre Dame cathedral into a “Temple of Reason” like some Cultural Revolution farce, the idea of a “day of rest”, for religious reasons or otherwise, was observed and respected there in Paris.

I, for one, have to work.  Looking out, some buildings are closed.  In the building I'm working in, some exits are locked as there is no one staffed on manning the egress.   People are not at work in many buildings and places like Starbucks have obviously decided not to bother stocking salads and sandwiches, as they aren’t expecting anyone to come by and eat them. 

But Shanghai, is Shanghai and even on Sunday its over crowded.  The streets are full, traffic remains intense, and there are no shortage of establishments, eateries or otherwise, that are open for business. Perhaps not unlike New York, Sunday is a day to shop, but not necessarily to rest.  

It suddenly looks like rain outside.  The clouds moved in so swiftly.  I haven’t thought to bring my umbrella over with me here to eat.  But I did bring it to where I’m working.  And that door isn't very far. The rain too is never far away here and I have become calloused once gain to expect rain every day.  Conditioned to avoid another dash home in a deluge or downpour wait-out, when I need to be home, working.

Once Again

For the second day in a row I’ve been shocked, by the news.  Once again I read the news before class and set out to teach all morning till noon.  And once again my students informed at the break me that there has been big news while we were meeting:  A coup in Turkey.  Once again I contemplate the implications of a very near miss. 

The day before I’d killed six hours in the Kemal Ataturk Airport.  The lounge there is splendid and it was so lovely for the second summer in a row after our proper visit to recharge, ever so slightly on Istanbul.  Outside I could make out faint minarets in the distance, the free Turkish meze, the free Turkish white wine, the free Turkish delight.  A bit reluctantly, I flew out on time that night and landed in Shanghai without incident.  Had I left a day later my flight would almost certainly have been cancelled and I’d have gotten very sick of free olives.

It was a remarkable turn around watching in the videos as the army asserted itself only to back down in defeat.  Who were the commanders who thought they could navigate such a thing? Were these orders or cajoling that made the rank and file guys think they could pull it off?  Noting the bitterness of it all, as soldiers were punched and herded into waiting areas, sulking in defeat.  The videos hardly looked like the Turkey I remembered.  I couldn’t help but watch the ones showing all the stranded travelers, as well.

Once again, I am feeling lucky to be alive and cautious of what’s to come.  I find I’m dreading tomorrow’s news cycle. What’s next?  I’m sitting here at “my” table on the second floor of the Wang Bao He hair crab restaurant across the street from the university.  Please don’t target my local crab place.  They all seem to remember me here at this officially recognized restaurant of traditional Shanghai chow.   Hairy crab on my cabbage, crab filled xiaolongbao it’s all very rich and I am most assuredly still jetlagged.   But at least I’m not encumbered by all this terrible news that following me around.                                                  

Wretched

Wretched.  I checked email on a break from teaching.  A friend, who’d written just this morning wrote again and asked now, if I was “OK.”  I wrote something back, breezily, suggesting I was characteristically busy suggesting I’d have time to answer his note soon.  “Just busy, that’s all.”  He wrote me back to draw my attention to what had just happened in Nice.  He wasn’t sure if I was still in France. 

Last night I had sat down and written about how all the fears of floods and strikes and terror attacks . . . were overblown.  No attacks while I was there.  I remember feeling faintly ill at ease writing that.  My family had yet to leave.  And fortunately they did leave safely a few hours later.  And a few hours after that, in a city near where we had just all been swimming and dining, a mile’s worth of revelers ridden over by zealot fanatic behind the wheel of a truck.

Nothing gun control, or bomb sniffing dogs nor police trained and armed as soldiers could do to stop this, then.  I think of the traffic cop who pulled me over last week, or of the young soldiers I saw near the café I frequented, the machine gun toting guards at the Charles De Gaulle airport.  None of them could have stopped a truck.  They weren’t equipped to stop such a thing.  What other blunt, protean means will they think up for mass killing?  How long before a fanatic finally gets the chance to use something much more powerful?

I’m glad my family is safe.  I’m glad we missed this.  But it does increasingly feel like nowhere is safe.  Somehow I know that when something big happens here, not if, but when, we will have an even more terrible overreaction than the one that the U.S. is guilty of.  Poor France is really being battered now. 

Without Incident Last Night

Walking up Beijing Road back in Shanghai, once again.  It’s thick and muggy out.  I’d been in France for two weeks in at least three different climates: the southeast, the south west and in the capital and it was never “muggy” this July.  Nor were there any floods, nor any strikes or attacks.  There was one evening we arrived at the Eiffel Tower to find it closed.  “Dad, you said it would be open!”  We found out later that some post Euro-cup soccer defeat had engendered a boisterous crowd, which shut down the monument.

But tonight it’s muggy.  I’ve just flown from Paris to Istanbul and then on to Shanghai.  Istanbul airport and Turkish Air had recently been attacked as well.  I’d thought about that, while I was there, sampling a half a dozen different olives, in the Star Alliance lounge.  But me and all the other people passed through without incident last night. 

And tonight I’m tired and as usual, all alone here in Shanghai.  I have a lot to do tomorrow and a lot to get ready before then.  But I tried to listen to wind in my mind as I walked over to this familiar restaurant this evening.  After three meals of Turkish Airlines food, which was pretty good, mind you, I am now ready for a bit of Shanghai food.

I tried to enjoy the odd juxtaposition of night in Paris, with a night looking out at Istanbul with a muggy night of Shanghai alleyways.  None of them are mine.  But this is the one, undeniably, that is closest to home.  The drunken yelling in this place, the boss berating one of the staff, asking her to count off the three ways she was wrong, my old traditional urge to yell out something smart and knowing it is always smarter far, to stay silent.  Well adjusted, back along the Huang Pu.

"And You've Seen The . . . "

There’s time for one-last-thing.  I will depart before the wife and kids as I need to be back in Shanghai.  They will have twenty hours or so without me to craft their own agenda for the city.  Today I depart around 3:30PM, so I should be OK with a cab at 1:00PM and I’ve already a good idea of what to do for the last morning. 

“Hurry up, eat your baguette.  One pastry each!  Yes, it’s cold out.  Put something else on.”  I promise a cab over if we can find one, but after that I need an ATM or we’ll never get one back.  We are en route to Sainte-Chapelle, which is walk-able but time is tight.  I probably should just keep quiet but I can’t help but get all Monty Hall about selling this.  “You guys have seen Chartres, and you’ve seen the rose window in Notre Dame, but if there is one hall of stained glass that might be able to top them, it’s at what lies behind door-number-three, at the place we’re heading this morning.”

For the third time in two days we are caught in the rain, in line.  Clearly I’m not adapting to the Parisian summer.  But it’s a short line and soon were inside the Palais de Justice and over at the front door of the great edifice.  As appropriate, I will make a confession.  For a brief second I thought the first floor was all we were going to see.  “Hey, where’s the tall room?”  Soon, I spotted the steps up and calmed down.  Having mastered my own fears I could now exploit those of others.  “Wow, this is really nice dad,” somewhat flat, admiring the gift shop.  “Yeah.  I guess its time to go.  Oh wait, one other thing.  Come with me.” 

And this is what I live for.  Up the steps and into the main hall, you could see their breath taken from them.  “Oh My God,” most assuredly not rendered as “OMG.”  They pointed out and I agreed that the effect might be more dramatic than any other church we’ve seen because it’s so concentrated and inescapable.  The blue wallpaper of the ceiling like a starry night and the glass that is dark and imperceptible outside is alight, demanding attention for each of the parables rendered.   Sit down for a while, and stare.  The winter before last I had seen the Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal.  It struck me as utterly distinct and of-its-soil, with its cold blue light everywhere behind the altar.  Standing inside Saint Chapelle I am reminded that this vision is clearly a seminal inspiration. 

Later we take a carefree stroll across the Pont au Changes, looking for bank.  My kids are mesmerized by all the book sellers there along the Quai de Megiserrie.  "You mean all these have stuff for sale?"  There could be no better day to ask me to buy them something than on this last morning and they walk off with Parisian pencil cases.  The stall keeper points us back over the Pont au Changes, and soon enough I have cash and a cab and we're on our way back to our apartment, up stream.