Things fall together
Download 7.05 Mb. Pdf ko'rish
|
|
Jack’s birthday, he’s 87 today, December 7th, a day that will live, for you, in fame and infamy alike. Why then does a song your mother used to sing when you were small enough to be easily picked up and held, suddenly pop into your head?
Was too large for the shelf, So it stood ninety years on the floor; It was taller by half Than the old man himself, Though it weighed not a pennyweight more. It was bought on the morn Of the day that he was born, And was always his treasure and pride; But it stopped short Never to go again, When the old man died.
Then she’d sing the chorus, as deep as her smoker’s voice could go, her inflection subtly cueing you to the absurdity hidden within the lyric’s portentions of tragedy.
Only now, Wikipedia-ing, do you learn out that “My Grandfather’s Clock” was written in 1876 by Henry Clay Work, who also authored “Marching Through Georgia” – among other British-style brass band classics as well as the sentimental ballads, “Come Home, Father,” and “The Ship That Never Returned.” EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 907
habitué of the Lion’s Den, The Cedar Tavern and the White Horse, all hipster spots – began concentrating his attention on the Dugout, a literal dive just down West Broadway and round the corner on Bleecker. At least once, when you couldn’t sleep, unsure as to what sort of mood he’d be in when he came home, you imagined pre- empting the moment. You’d walk to the Dugout, down the stairs and through the door. Barefoot, in your pajamas and carrying your teddy bear beneath your arm, you’d stand beside his barstool and sing – both to publicly shame him, and compel his return.
Father, dear father, come home with me now! The clock in the steeple strikes one; You said you were coming right home from the shop, As soon as your day's work was done. Our fire has gone out our house is all dark And mother's been watching since tea…
Somewhere you’d heard the tune and lyrics to that one too. And realized, even at the time, that conjuring up this earnest, Victorian image of yourself playing child guardian to your errant dad, allowed you to feel a bit less obliterated. It also made you want to laugh.
• • •
The Tsar has been deposed! Don’t cry Anastasia, don’t cry. • • •
Gates is confirm’d as Sec’y of Defense. Capitol Hill gives a CIA of relief. A different sort of exhale perhaps among the Nicaraguan thirty-somethings – children in the mid-80s – who owe their missing body parts to Gate’s “intelligence work” in their countryside.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 908
95 to 2, the vote came down, those calling “yea” including the junior Senator from Illinois and great hope of the liberal magical thinkers, Barak H. Obama. But the fact is, he’s obaminable, as awful in his own way as Hilary C.
Denial is a long river indeed, replete with many a cataract and muddy delta at the mouth. In the mind.
• • •
Describe. Describe a path.
Noonish. Trip down to Bowling Green to Michael K.’s office to meet him for lunch. Get out at the south end of the Rector Street stop. Just a few blocks behind you, unseen since you never turn to establish a sightline, the spectacle of deconstruction workers taking down the Deutsche Bank building. Little by little. Because the structure remains toxic even after all that cleaning – what was the figure, $70 millionsworth? It’s a year’s project at least – a painstakingly slow sequel to the quick and dirty demolition work just across Liberty street that left the Deutche building ruined yet standing.
First to go will be its glass windows and the metal column covers from the top four floors. Crews will still be looking, so officials say, for bits of people deposited there five plus years ago. Next in the disassembly order, the steel and concrete skeleton of those upper floors. Incrementally, parts of the building and the fragments of tower and airplane wreckage that landed inside it, all laced with asbestos, lead, mercury and you name it poisons will start a journey somewhere, all wrapped, it is promised, nicely in plastic. Where, oh where does all this finally rest? Who will receive this vast trove of contaminated stuff? Someone must know, but they ain’t publicly telling.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 909
into the air from the building’s disassembly, the only thing to do is breathe. Clear as crystal the skydome above. Too cold for condensation.
• • •
Back home. Nearly five. Out come the binoculars on a gorgeously embered southern twilight.
The left half of the façade of the Deutsche Bank building is still visible behind the new WTC 7. Weird beyond weird, amidst all the lit-up downtown office towers, to see its hulk completely blacked out save for a swooping zigzag of worklights that shine gaily from the top of the structure down to the lower floors. Certainly you can’t be the only one who immediately registers this shape as the stylized outline of a Christmas tree – the left half of one at any rate. Whether intended as an effect, or fortuitously random, the illumination imparts a light and lyrical touch to this, the world’s tallest superfund site. Except it isn’t a superfund site.
Change your view. Look east. A flash popping in a 26th Street loft. Some photographer at work or play.
Lights flicker from the opposite loft In this room the heat pipes just cough The country music station plays soft But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off…
In New York City, in the spas and salons, storefront fingernail joints and yea even beneath the canopies of street fairs, how many thousands of Asian work at kneading the knotted muscles of stressed-out Oxos into some semblance of relaxation? “Don’t worry that your civilization is down the tubes,” the palm root of their every hand seems to say. “It’s our day now,” chorus the fingers, “but we’ll soothe away, for EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 910
now, for a price, all your tensions, all your fears, however buried, of that hard, hard landing to come.”
• • •
Return home from an amazing performance of Ragtime at LaGuardia to scan the round midnight front page of the online Times. They’ve outdone themselves. On the righthand side of the page – separated from the gaggle of confused articles about Iraq by an eerie photo of the space shuttle taking off by night, its trail of light arching above the still harbor of Daytona Beach – there’s a teaser blurb for a travel feature: “Luxury Destination of the Year. In Zambia, you can watch hippos from the comfort of your own sunken tub.”
• • •
How did Wiscon-sin, boys? She stole a New-brass-key, Too bad that Arkan-saw, boys, And so did Tenna-see. It made poor Flori-die, boys, It made poor Flori-die, you see, She died in Missouri, boys, She died in Missouri!
• • •
Era of misguided missiles. • • •
Preserve me from false discriminations. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 911
• • •
Prep school. Perp school. What a difference, or not so much… • • •
Funny thing to think of, those days early in the seventies when, still shell- shocked from the implosion of the movement, you fell in with a crew of young people at work who seemed relatively unscathed by what you’d imagined to be the generalized traumas of the time. They were talented, good-looking, smart and had passed through their teens and art school blithe and apolitical, focused mainly on their work and imbued with expectations of future careers for which they would not have to hustle. They must have found you entertaining, authentic even, if not Black, because they seemed to include you, to tolerate you despite your politics. Your taken-for-granted coin of exchange for years had depreciated enormously in value but could still cadge you an invite to a dinner party where the increasingly sophisticated food was washed down with mineral waters and evermore well-chosen wines.
Thus you witnessed the birth of the Hipoisie, people who gravitated, as though by natural selection, to the lofts that would, in the fullness of time, become gazillion dollar real estate prizes. As they turned one notch further away from Boho, your hosts flowered as the hideous but all too true characters populating the cocktail parties in William Hamilton’s New Yorker cartoons.
And here, thirty plus years on, you, Katie and Gwen, the three of you, incubating an altogether different kind of life, high up in a little socialist bubble above thoroughfares of Manhattan. What choice do the rock doves have but to adapt to foraging higher still than the stratum at which the circling hawks glide? Safe after a fashion, as long as the raptors remain incapable of imagining their hoped-for prey looking down on them.
Pinochet dies. Not exactly Houdini, but an escape of sorts. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 912
Must one be a disaster tourist in one’s own country?
You say ecommerce and I say e-coli – let’s call the whole thing off.
• • •
In China, they’ve appropriated the old Castro Convertibles song – we’re not using it any more – to serve as a slogan in support of their President:
• • •
Parked in front of you this a.m., decorated with a dayglo orange parking ticket, a big, stupid, black Ford SUV. You learn, from the chrome letters affixed to its tailgate, that that this model is an Escape. The logo is italicized, signifying forward momentum. but beneath this word, straight blocky capital letters boxed in with a thick border: LIMITED.
Well, at least they’re honest after a fashion. Escape (Limited) for how many? Thirty thousand North American Ford workers just got their pink slips.
• • •
Tomorrow the Virgin of Guadalupe rises, over the hill of Tepeyac and yes, 14th Street. Down in the harbor, on any day, Our Lady, who also, at will, takes on the aspect of Tonantzin, mother and moon. How do you say “imprisoned lightning” in Nahuatl? Or “Mother of Exiles” in Ladino.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 913
• • •
Last night watched Sydney Pollack’s documentary on Frank Gehry, né Goldberg. Whew, people have a tendency to get fixated on an object. When Gehry was a child in Hebrew school, he made a drawing of some important Jewish figure whose name you’ve suddenly forgotten. The rabbi told Frank’s mother that her son possessed
more dimensionally realized than his buildings. Now it comes back, and no wondered you disremembered. The subject of Goldberg’s drawing was Theodor Herzl.
• • •
Shattered boy?! What made you hear that in the piped-in music over the drugstore’s sound system – bad speakers, or your own funky ears?
• • •
World, acquired leases and operating contracts for six U.S. ports: New York, Newark, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Tampa and New Orleans when it bought Peninsular and Oriental holdings, a British port and shipping company, for a mere $7 billion. A frenzy of anti-“semitism” was quickly whupped up by political figures grandstanding on the cheap about a bunch of towel-heads owning ‘merican ports. Visions of (Arabian) Trojan horses danced in their heads, not least in the febrile brain of New York’s own Senator Chuck Schumer, who’s always trying to prove he’s not boneless.
So great was the nativist furor that the new owners agreed to sell off their investments and today the new deal was announced. All DP’s U.S. holdings, the terminal operations that set off the firestorm, cargo-handling enterprises at sixteen ports and the New York City passenger ship terminal got gobbled by a subsidiary of the American International Group, founded in Shanghai just after WWI by the Cornelius Vander Starr, the first lo fan to sell insurance in China. Starr lasted a long time at the
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 914
helm and when he departed in the late sixties, turned operations over to Maurice “Hank” Greenberg. By all accounts, Hank ran a pretty tight ship until the early oh-ohs, when he started miscounting noughts on his balance sheets. So much need, so little time – between quarterly reports. Pending a regulatory inquiry, Hank walked the plank – but not very far – in early ’05.
And the bottom line, please. A-rabs, thankfully, control our ports no longer – rather a gigantic mostly-legal extortion racket that agreed to pay a $1.6 billion penalty for accounting fraud in February right around the time DP bought the ports. So here we are, all gelt and no guilt. And a Heppy Chanukah to you, Henkeleh bubby.
Get myself free and move my shadow without leaving a trace.
So says Liang Zhen Pu via Li Zi Ming in Ba Gua song 21.
Wednesday is the day of rest in the house with the bamboo floor picking off the barroom flies just in case I need another glass. It’s so hot and the mirror’s getting dull I couldn’t see it, couldn’t see it if I tried. The man in the mask has sold out all for nothing at all and now the monsoon’s here and it feels like judgment day Watch out for the eagle’s eye or the opium on the breakfast tray and the laughter of the dying monk EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 915
So sang John Cale, once upon a time to the west.
Late morning turbines overhead – god love ‘em – a plane flying entirely too low to be so far from a landing strip. But there’s no seeing it for the density of the cloudcover and the rain splattered on your window. It’s up there somewhere, metal in the air, metal in the droplets. Beyond this, the sun writes its own biography, chapter and verse. Vade mecum, vade mecum, says your book, go with me.
• • •
Carter’s done it now. Set himself up. Them Zionistas gonna put a hurtin’ on that boy. Po’ Jimmy. He crazy, so he don’t know no better. Thinks truth-talking more important than life itself. If he’d come by me, I’da told him straight up: Jimmy, you got to watch what you say.
• • •
Fanon to himself, Kan ya makan, but others heard too.
• • •
Images of various Gehry structures still resounding in your head. If not Euclidian, than what sort of geometry can it be? Not, seemingly, elliptic or hyperbolic. Nothing native to (poor old Bucky’s) planet earth. Must be Lovecraftian. The geometry out of space. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 916
– the setting sun of American hegemony – is maybe just that. But it’s also the birth – or, more likely, the coming of age – of a new math. Hard to tell.
This realization also casts, to your eyes at any rate, the WTC in a new light. Its extreme parallelism was always a breakdown of the thing it over-represented, a monstrous joke, perhaps unconscious, on two thousand-odd years of Greek geometry and the myriad assumptions that flowed therefrom. Like “equality.” One hundred plus stories above the level of the harbor, so grotesque had the extension of parallel lines become, that folks swaying at their desks up there used to get seasick!
If the geometrics are unsustainable, of course the building will be. If not Mohammed Atta, then some one, or some thing else. One shouldn’t be fooled by the obvious: that Yamasaki’s late buildings are so vertical, and Gehry’s style isn’t about that per se. The mission of both men was, and in the latter case, is, to call out loud and clear the dismantling of what we knew and believed to be eternal and universal principles of building. Of which phenomenon Gehry’s work exemplifies the next decisive development. Would that Gehry was an anarchist – a destroyer in service of the future. He’s not. Would that his nihilism leaves, if not something standing, at least a ground in which new shoots can grow.
Of course it’s not just Gehry. He, like all architects, is a billboard artist, so whatever the form is, you see it writ big. Strip matters down to their basics, and the whole political and corporate game reveals itself to be infused with the same anti-ethos, anti-logos. You’d defy anyone, anyone, to listen to a speech by Condoleezza Rice – the most rhetorically gifted of her cabal – and find an ounce of common sense therein.
Plenty of hard lines drawn. But no way will any three of them permit you to construct a triangle. Is this a good thing? Who knows? It’s a thing. One we’ve never seen – or perhaps seen but not recognized? – before.
• • •
Hard to see world with head up ass.
EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 917
Ahmet Ertegun died last night, age 83. Class ears.
• • •
Vexatious fixations. Fixacious vexations. • • •
Santa must jump over fire. Is he therefore a Zoroastrian? • • •
The geomorphic X. Turkey, the Isthmus of Panama – imagine, but for a little Download 7.05 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
|