I look and listen for this man whenever I change subway lines at Roosevelt Ave. in Queens. I often find him midway on the Manhattan-bound platform, facing the E and F trains. In quiet moments I hear the melancholy strains of the erhu, a two-stringed Chinese violin. The chords convey the vastness of China, the long history, the pain, the hope. His own story, I do not know. He keeps his head down, plays to the beat from a mobile speaker. He puts a modest cardboard box between his sneakers. I stand up close. His China is not the neon-and-skyscraper China I encountered at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, after they bulldozed most of the hutongs, the old neighborhoods. I take a few photos on my iPhone. He does not seem to notice. I drop $5 in the box and say “Xie Xie” -- thanks, in Mandarin. He says, “Thank you.” Then my train arrives.
Joshua Rubin
10/26/2016 09:55:21 am
There are quite a few erhu players amongst the subway buskers in our vast system. There used to be a guy who teamed up with a Dominican accordianist, and they played each other's traditional songs and some American standards. Very sweet. There is an [erhuist?] regularly at the Jay Street stop in Brooklyn who plays Jingle Bells all year long, except that he plays "oh what fun it is to ride" as an F# and gets stuck there for three extra bars. Drives me crazy. I give him money anyway. Can any of you Chinese linguistic scholars teach me how to say "I will pay you double if you can fix that F sharp?"
George Vecsey
10/26/2016 12:00:48 pm
Josh: There is a more formal way, but I thought I would try to keep it simple. (Ummm, actually, I used Google Translate This is nothing if not a full-service web site. GV.)
Joshua Rubin
10/26/2016 03:05:33 pm
Thanks, George, but I would be afraid to actually say it. One wrong intonation and I'd be punched in the nose.
George Vecsey
10/26/2016 04:17:34 pm
Josh: I'm sure they can. 10/26/2016 04:25:21 pm
Subway musicians are great. The IRT 2 & 3 always had a variety of cultures and skill levels.
George Vecsey
10/27/2016 09:27:29 am
Alan, no buskers in the Berkshires?
Brian Savin
10/27/2016 09:02:06 pm
I played a lot of Erhu music on Apple Music today, with a lot of enjoyment. Once again, George, you taught me something worthwhile. Thanks.
George Vecsey
10/28/2016 10:28:31 am
Brian, You're the guy who got me reading the Theodore Roosevelt biography, so thank you. 10/31/2016 05:42:29 pm
Yo Yo Ma is an amazing person.For all his fame, he is a regular down to earth guy.
bruce
10/30/2016 07:59:31 pm
George,
George Vecsey
10/31/2016 10:53:37 am
Bruce: It was "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt," by Edmund Morris, the first of three. It takes him to being out in the woods and being told that President McKinley had died. I met Roosevelt's daughter Ethel Derby, around 1973. We live half an hour from his home in Sagamore Hill, and my friends Brian and Janet Savin invited us for a tour of the home. I wrote about it on this site:
bruce
10/31/2016 12:57:08 pm
George, 10/31/2016 06:38:31 pm
“The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism” by Doris Kearns Goodwin is an interesting book on many levels. It not only covers the man, but also the age in which he lived.
bruce
10/31/2016 07:12:50 pm
it's hard to escape your time, innit? I loved Churchill, but some of his beliefs--white man's burden for example--don't fit very well today, do they? I enjoyed kearns Goodwin's bio. have a few of her books....
Alan Rubin
11/1/2016 11:21:58 am
I agree that “Trader” Lane was not a true baseball man.
bruce
11/1/2016 01:15:33 pm
alan, 11/30/2016 05:03:33 am
<a href="http://newyear2017.site/">New Year 2017 Wallpaper Free Download</a> Comments are closed.
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Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html Categories
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