Monday, May 19, 2014

You're Faring Better then the Morgans




I had it in me to solve the bird mystery I’d raised yesterday.  On the way to the gym in the early morning I took to whistling the call I’d heard and I fancied I had it down pretty well.  “Doot, doot.  Doot, doot.”  He didn’t show this morning, though I was listening for him.  But I imagined that later, I’d call my step dad, an ornithologist and I’d whistle my whistle and he’d say:  “oh . . . Doot, doot.  Doot doot?  Sure.  That’s a warbler.”  I determined to make that call before I sat down this morning to write this. 

Well, we just spoke and my tweeting didn’t ring a bell.  He suggested that if it were an Asian bird he might not recognize it, as his specialty are birds of the Americas.  “But I know I’ve heard this back home!” I insisted.  I tried my call again a few times hoping it would suddenly burst Madeline-like into his consciousness.  (mind you, this is a man who can normally name just about whatever comes his way).   But I whistled in vane.   My mom suggested I record it with my iPhone, which is probably the sensible thing to do, if our lonely, nameless four-noted friend returns. 



Have a look at this article, which I thought raised an interesting point: Fu Mengzi, Vice President, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, writing in the on line publication: “Chinafocus.com” critiqued the recent visit by Obama to our region.  Mr. Fu points out that for what was (I believe) the first time, the U.S. stated overtly that the Diaoyu/Senakaku islands were not only Japanese territory, but, importantly, they were overtly included in the U.S. mutual defense pact.  Long intimated, this is only so surprising.  Mr. Fu though, then pointed out something interesting.  The Takeshima/Dokdo islands are currently administered by South Korea and are claimed by Japan, but Obama refused to state that they were part of the U.S., South Korea defense pact.   If the status quo were truly challenged in the one instance and not the other, it will invariably push South Korea further away, towards China.  America has to be willing to challenge and support Japan, in a balanced fashion.

Driving home today in my Honda Odyssey, after dropping my kids off at school, I thought about the instances of angry Chinese damaging Japanese cars and indeed the drivers of Japanese cars.  And of course the Japanese consulate complained and China as a nation looked course, and chaotic, rather than the stately home of parent civilization dignity, it might wish to project.  This, then mirrored down in Vietnam, where the local government has to effectively apologized for the rampant destruction of Chinese and other property, as chaotic and beneath Vietnamese civilization.  Does China see itself, do the people who flipped Japanese cars see themselves, when they see Vietnamese raging against all things Chinese?  This is the third instance where it would appear that Xi Jinping has personally authorized disruptive assertions of Chinese power projection.  It will be interesting to see what else he has planned for this year.

The other night a friend was over who referenced an argument with his wife that challenged his own sense of civility.  Alas a bit of 夫妻反目[1] that this friend was working through.  I reminded him that no matter how bad it got at least they’d navigated things better than Lee Morgan. 

I searched my DustyBrine and confirmed that I have yet to profile the great bop trumpet player in a posting to-date, though he has been referred to before.  My favorite Lee Morgan album is a wonderful, rather obscure disc he did on the Jazzland Record label in 1962 entitled “Take Twelve.”  There are many other more notable sessions of his from his time on the Blue Note label, later in the decade, but something magical happened on “Take Twelve.” 

And so I had a look today and found the session by this man from Philly from right before “Take Twelve” entitled “Lee Way.”  An all-star cast with Art Blakey, Paul Chambers, Bobby Timmons and Jackie McLean the session is predictably solid.  The four tunes are lovely and Morgan himself sounds typically confident, whimsical on this tune just now, Midtown Blues.  Twelve years later Lee Morgan would suffer some irreparable Lower East Side Blues when his wife shot him between sets down on Avenue C.  As the gun was taken from her hand, she is supposed to have screamed "Baby, what have I done?"  Ambulances were loath to go to the neighborhood that is now apparently antiseptic and Lee Morgan bled to death there in the club. 






[1] fūqīfǎnmù:  man and wife fall out (idiom, from Book of Changes); marital strife

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