Blood. He’d had the same dream in the cities he’d visited – with their underground networks of pipes like cobwebs  - running thick with blood. And from the cracks and curvatures of the pipes, from the l-bends and u-bends, blood spurts like water. A fountain of brackish rain sprays the air; a bright-red assault on the senses. And there he saw the wells and rivers all turned red, rancid with the stench of blood. I suppose it is misfortunately befitting that on August 18^th I began reading Yan Lianke’s Dream of Ding Village. This is the newest censored novel of one of China’s greatest living writers. (It was, partly, in homage to one of his books “Serve the People” that Dan and I wrote our lyrics for our song of the same name.) In this newest publication he writes about the blood-selling scandal that occurred in his native Henan Province which resulted in the outbreak of AIDS and the wholly undeserved loss of many counted lives. He follows the “bloodheads” and families most effected by the heinous and exploitative “plasma-economy.” Every page of it is shocking and disturbing. The passage above introduces the dream that first imagines the fever which leads to people first “dying like dogs” then “dying like moths to a flame.” And everyone knows that, in this world, people care more about dying dogs than moths. Eventually Lianke describes their buried corpses as if they were stacked sheaths of wheat. It is with these grave and unjust images in my brain that I witness the blood of the most horrific death I have ever seen. In New York City, a man’s life is taken, in halves, directly outside of the Bowery Ballroom. Cycling, he met his end in a collision with a transport truck. Sometimes injustice comes in the unspeakable policies of government and economy; and sometimes injustice comes in nightmarish accidents. The blood always spills. This man’s death, his name and life story published the next morning by every New York paper, felt monstrously wrong. No one could believe their eyes. No one could muster the right words to describe this most grisly and gory and ghastly and tragic collapse. Sometimes you are alerted to how precious life is by mortal events, instead I felt how violent and unfair it can be. There was no room for lamentation or grief. It was too catastrophic to feel much besides shock and terror and confusion and distrust. The staff at the Bowery helped carry out tarps to cover the spilling blood and dismembered body of this pointlessly slain human. And soon the cops and coroners arrived with their police tape and cameras. It took a long time for them to figure out how to remove his body from the chaos and as the hours passed and as passersby passed by to rubber-neck and as retellings of the same story became more and less wrong in their chain link narrative, it continued to feel unfair. This was wrong and dreadful and there is nothing that can be done or said. The only promise that I can make is that we promise to go on, to live on, best we can. We are sorry for you. We are sorry for those that knew and loved you and will continue to know and love you as they go on and live on. The blood of you came into my nostrils and, as I continue to breathe in, you become a part of me. I will go on with your blood. It’s the only thing I can do. I am so sorry. Rest in peace.