Things fall together
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on. One could, of course, have a new display made with smaller digits and more of ‘em in anticipation of exponentially greater debt to come. Or keep the columns the same size and – hey, Doug, you’re a savvy developer – just find a wider wall. Better yet, fuggedaboudit.
Samantha, whose fans at Le G. have turned legion, asks some regulars to help celebrate her birthday in a subterranean Japanese bierstube in the East Village, just down the block from the apartment you and Bea lived in for a year or so back in the early ‘60s, before heaven’s gate opened and you were ushered into a brand new apartment in Penn South. Her invitation finishes with a line that’s pure Samantha: Qui m’aime, vienne!
• • •
According to Liang Zhen Pu, via the manual his student Li Zi Ming wrote, the study of Ba Gua strategy allows one to become “As stable as Mt. Taishan.” Elsewhere, he advises that to be “effective in the attack art” one must “move like the wind and stand as if nailed in place.”
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• • •
In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans Terius “Juvenile” Gray’s mansion was engulfed by Lake Pontchartrain. In “Get Ya Hustle On,” one of the tracks on his new album Reality Check, he raps:
April Fool’s Day. Epitaph for an Empire: They extracted the resources, but missed the hidden treasure.
• • •
as the sun draws a billion tons of water each day unseen into the sky there to appear as beautiful clouds which in turn raining down maintain life on earth – by similar indirect cultivation a great quality came to America.
So wrote Bucky Fuller in his Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization.
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Japan, Jerseys to New York and Paychecks to Parsippany.” Below which, in slightly smaller letters: “The Port of New York and New Jersey brings the world to your door.”
At the bottom of the poster, a photo of a fully-loaded container ship plying the high seas and the web address of the ad’s sponsor: DeliveringProsperity.com. And beneath, in miniscule type: New York Shipping Association.
But really, do we deliver all that? Jerseys to New York, sure – more like teeshirts though, manufactured in another country. How much china bound for Japan actually flows through New York’s port? And Paychecks to Parsippany? That must refer to the port’s economic benefits, which according to the ad copy “provides 239,000 jobs in the region.” But how does one define “provide” and “region”? Given that the port “handled more than $115 billion in cargo in 2005,” the number of jobs claimed doesn’t seem all that impressive. True, $115 yards is a lot of jackola, but what was the value, in relative terms, of the cargo handled in 1995, 1985, or 1955? Time to open all the books, private and public world round. Let’s see what flows out of ‘em.
Sideways is the new down.
“The Bush administration sees Ira q as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for its troops and bases for years to come.” So says Joseph Gerson, a historian of American military bases, as quoted by The Independent.
The article continues with words from Zoltan Grossman, a geographer: “After every U.S. military intervention since 1990, the Pentagon has left behind clusters of new bases in areas where it never before had a foothold. The new string of bases stretch from Kosovo and adjacent Balkan states, to Iraq and other Persian Gulf states, into Afghanistan and other Central Asian States… the only two obstacles to a geographically contiguous U.S. sphere of influence are Iran and Syria.”
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word. “Certainly the mood music has been all about withdrawal of troops. Now we are beginning to see the glimmers of the real policy.”
• • •
Along the west side of Ninth Avenue in the lower 20s, signs taped to meters warning that cars parked there after 5 p.m. will be towed., And why? The trailers are icumen in. Wondrous the title of the movie: “Train Wreck.”
• • •
Everywhere you go, the parrot on your shoulder squawks: “Pieces of crap, pieces of crap!”
• • •
Is there such a thing as Auto-Schadenfreude, where one takes a perverse pleasure in one’s own undoing – cackles with secret appreciation at the chickens coming home to roost?
• • •
Home where the heart is. Drilling outside from some construction site sounds, for an instant, like a sharper version of your black cat purring. Similar enough to make you turn to see if Tibble is in the room behind you. No, it’s a jackammer, maybe a couple of blocks uptown, the acoustics made crazy in the heavy spring damp.
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practicing. Combat as if moving through tall grass.
• • •
Ride down the river, past the Gansevoort Peninsula, a landfill build into the Hudson in the 19th Century and, for many years, site of a Department of Sanitation incinerator. In April 2002, the DOS demolished the furnace’s iconic duple smokestacks. First twin towers you registered, trade center icons avant la lettre. The building had been converted into a garage for sanitation trucks years before. But back in June, 1956 – you’d have been just over six years old – the FDA burned several tons of confiscated publications there, including books by Wilhelm Reich. More of Reich’s books went up in smoke that August, and still more in 1960.
Though the DOS still maintains a facility there, Gansevoort Peninsula is technically part of the Hudson River Park Trust, whose prospectus describes it as the future “home to such amenities as a rocky shoreline beach, a play lawn and recreational boating areas.” Will WR and his conflagrated books rate a plaque at the footprint of the vanished twin smokestacks?
• • •
Prussians beware! Hippies take care! Yesterday, a woman at the café wore jeans with what looked like Iron Crosses appliquéd to the back pockets. Leaving, she slung on a jean jacket embroidered with myriad tiny flowers.
• • •
One glance at the paper belies the phony order of the street. Consciously or not, the world’s insurging.
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in eyes that are bright.
– Ba Gua masters via Li Zi Ming • • •
So says Pugachev, a rebel against Tsarina Katerina in Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia, III.
10:45 a.m. Yellow-gray sky. Buildings downtown obscured. Weirdest weather – ever.
11:15 a.m. Absurdly large snowflakes, a blizzard of ‘em, like lint from a Brobdignagian dryer.
• • •
In certain texts on Ba Gua, the dantian is said to be the residence of primal qi, or yuan qi, the energy each person receives from their parents.
• • •
Ye mammothe hath a hump’d head, a hump’d head hath he. And had he not a hump’ed head, no mammothe would he be.
• • •
Imaginary factory sign: Knudson Bolts. • • •
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“September 11 wasn’t the Zapruder film, it was the Zapruder film festival.” Thus actor Charlie Sheen weighs in as a 9/11 skeptic. “Show us,” he’s quoted by PrisonPlanet.com on the Pentagon attack, “how this particular plane pulled off these maneuvers. 270º turn at 500 mph, descending 7000 feet in 2.5 minutes, skimming across treetops the last 500 meters.”
• • •
Once upon a time in the 18th Century, Lt. Col. George Washington commanded a militia that massacred a number of French troops – some accounts call them members of a “diplomatic party.” Whatever the case, their leader, Joseph Coulon De Villiers de Jumonville was wounded in the engagement, then brained, literally, by Washington’s ally, the Seneca “half king” Tanaghrisson.
“I heard the bullets whistle and, believe me, there is something charming in the sound,” said young Washington of the battle later known as Jumonville Glen, which opened the French and Indian War.
• • •
“My first attempt to sing,” says Oliver “Tuku” Mtukuduzi, guitarist and chanteur extraordinaire, “was my birth cry.”
10:30 a.m. Singly on cellphones, or in couples as they rip down the street, the whole of Chelsea sounds like it has come down with Tourette’s.
• • •
1:30-ish. As you pass by on your bicycle, soaked from the predicted rain, from inside his coffee, bagel and donut kiosk, Abdul flashes you a peace sign. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 735
No peace, noplace. Just as you fled to Tampa, sick as a dog after 9/11 only to find yourself shacked up a stone’s throw from Centcom, it turns out that the idyllic cottage in the Cotswolds – the one you borrowed from Katie’s cousin Simon, and where you spent a happy week back in summer ‘04 – is practically within spitting distance of the big USAF base in Fairford from which the big B2s and their cousins rain hell onto Afghanistan and Iraq from miles above. Yes, and Cheltenham’s next door too: GCHQ, old man.
• • •
5:30 p.m. Busy Friday foot traffic on Broadway and 73rd. Among the pedestrians wends a beautiful pigeon, white mostly, with a multiplicity of gray dapplings. It’s – her? – legs colored a robust purple-red. Bird flu, shmird flu, this one’s in the pink.
• • •
Roxy Music in your head: Dancing city Now you’re talking But where’s your soul?
How do you dismantle not just a political state, but a whole set of acquired expectations, habits and shared assumptions? How to carve up a corpse before it’s quite cold? Is Bush doing a good job with that? Did Clinton? Will the next one?
The role of the president, to whom evermore power is granted or ceded, becomes that of a CEO presiding over the cannibalization of a no-longer profitable corporation. EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 736
Or worse, crashing the corporation in order to sell off its bits. What passes as the Bush Doctrine may well not be the Bush agenda, consciously or otherwise. The former may be reprehensible, but the latter is bloody well nihilist.
Stafford Beer – witness his exclamation point – said it exuberantly, even euphorically: “The purpose of a system is what it does!”
• • •
Gray afternoon cold spring breath. It comes to you unbidden that when you were very small, your father had a nickname for you: “Boo-bah.” Along the walk to your front door, the hedge leaves brilliant green.
• • •
Chicago typewriter: that’s what they used to call a Tommy gun in the Roaring ‘20s. Did they develop a style manual to go with it? Was it’s use part of the curriculum incorporated into the Chicago School?
• • •
Interior energy of the earth, in play with what’s outside. What’s the mood and state of the solar capacitor at on any given day?
Somehow, flattened to the brand new macadam surface of the rightmost lane of Eighth Avenue, just shy of 23rd Street, the halved skins of myriad oranges – got to be a hundred of ‘em. Were they once in a bag, now vanished in the wind, that fell off a lorry? Did they drop by accident or design? So many bright demi-suns pancaked by a gazillion tires into a chromatically stunning ellipse.
Too late to stop. Now, since you don’t want to ride over them, do you bike around to the right and into the traffic rushing past, or swing left, too close for comfort EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 737
to the door zone of the parked cars. Glance back over right shoulder, stop pedaling while cab wooshes by, then swerve behind and into the slipstream – take advantage of the displaced air.
• • •
Seeing is bereaving. • • •
Everything in its propped-up place. • • •
You’d think it would be safe to go to the New School of a Sunday afternoon and hear the Guaneri String Quartet, but from the opening notes of the Haydn, it’s clear that something’s gone awry. The second violin and cello seem more or less in tune with one another, but the first violin is sharp, plus his intonation’s way off. And the viola, while smooth in his playing, sounds flat. The cellist, a substantially-built fellow, has the expressive, mobile face of a British character actor and you find yourself looking to him for clues to the fate of this particular universe.
On the heels Haydn, the quartet swing into the allegro agitato e appassionato movement of a 1926 piece in A-minor by Ernö Dohnányi – truly the end of our strife- torn world enacted in strings. Parts of the andante religioso con variazioni manage a kind of harmonic majesty despite the off-tunings, but by the start of the vivace giosco – giddyap! – it is revealed that these three movements are like strangers sharing a compartment in a trainwreck.
You and K., for Gwen wisely chose to be elsewhere, leave at intermission, foregoing the Mendelssohn F-minor, Op. 80. Who knows what you missed, maybe they tuned? It’s a very ancient crowd you fall in with, making your way toward daylight. Fifteen years from today – no, less – this hall will be empty.
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• • •
We’ve got a lot of carrion luggage. • • •
There’s something about an octopus in a uniform. • • •
Pythonides, a well-swelled philosopher. • • •
Villepin climbs down the tree. The French government, if one can use such a word, rescinds its First Employment Contract after massive labor and student strikes.
On these shores, by the hundreds of thousands, millions even, pro-immigration marchers take to the streets to block Resolution 4437 and assert the value of their presences. A news photo of a rally in Tyler, TX, shows a young woman holding a placard high. Painted on it side by side: the Stars and Stripes and the flag of Los Estados Unidos de Mexico. Her slogan reads (en Ingles, por favor): JUSTICE and DIGNITY for EVERYONE.
Closer to home, downtown at City Hall, Chung-Wa Hong, director of the New York Immigration Coalition spoke to a cheering crowd of the world’s people: Korean, Hmong, Senegalese, Salvadorian, Chinese, Guyanese – name it we got it. “We are inseparable, indivisible and impossible to take out of America. We are New Yorkers!”
• • •
Insurge, insurge! That’s the order of the day. Even to the highest heights. Will Nepal stay a dictatorship for long?
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• • •
Burlesqoni (sic) tries to fix it. • • •
Caravans bring the selected displaced back to New Orleans to vote for mayor. Somewhere in all of this, goddess rising.
• • •
The 9/11 story buried. But eventually, bones will tell. • • •
South to Alaska. • • •
The Pentagon PR spider spins a “long war.” It’s a long way to Tipperary. • • •
I and thou. Naw, eye on Dow. Pull up the rope. But why bother? Ships a’going down.
Rhetoric precedes action like dusk betokens the night. Under “Top Story” on your default web page: White House Blasts Iran’s Nuclear Milestone.
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blues:
Way on down to Lego Town Lord, when you build a city out of Legos It’s so easy to knock down.
• • •
Not a hiccup in subway or bus service as Roger Toussaint, the union’s non-leader is sentenced to jail for ten days.
• • •
For eons now you’ve followed the precepts of the great Sufi skeptic/mystic Ibn So.
Passover and out. • • •
“Donald is the people’s billionaire!” This a pull quote on a Learning Annex catalogue from a “student” who attended Trump’s “course” at the Greatest Wealth Expo on Earth, in Lost Angeles.
• • •
So much out of the past floods your head these days. This morning, an image of your grandfather Meyer crumbling bacon into the eggs he was scrambling for your breakfast while singing “A Little Bit off the Top.” Later you learned that there are two EEric Darton NOTES OF A NEW YORK SON 741
versions of the ditty, one, a Cockney song about an insatiable dinner guest who’s got designs on the whole of his host’s pork roast. The other’s naughtier and refers to circumcision. At five or six though, you thought “a little bit off the top” had to do with a haircut. Maybe because Meyer hummed most of the lyrics and only sang words to the chorus.
The greenest spring ever.
• • •
Via landbridge and/or boat: that extraordinary combination of Chinese and Viking that somehow yielded the features of those boys and girls named Sioux.
• • •
Strike’s planned for Mayday. The idea is that immigrant workers will take the day not so much off, as for their own purposes. “We are one people. Change is coming whether you like it or not, and we’re going to stick together and not allow anyone to manipulate us.” Brave words from Councilman Charles Baron de Brooklyn. How real is any of this? Megacoverage of the “immigrant rights” movement. But class politics dare not speak its name.
• • •
Great music on the Lex platform at Union Square. Drum ensemble plus Download 7.05 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
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