Work
is something I leave off this space.
There’s enough to the rest of life that merits reckoning with. Discretion, in my mind, is the better
part of work. I finished a phase
of a project tonight that was taxing and well outside my comfort zone and it is
good to sit back now and exhale and consider the arc of the engagement. There are a few days left to go but
I’ve made it through the part that seemed most challenging to me and it feels
very good to be on this side of it,
有始有终[1].
And walking home, once again tonight I needed something
different to eat. The
thrill’s gone on my local Shanghainese-Sichuanese place. It’s raining out there and though I’ve
an umbrella, I am most definitely not inclined to walk along the wet neon streets
around my residence looking for that rare, authentic, family–style restaurant
of my memory palace that is out there, just beyond the next block. I’ve had too
many notable misses to-date. I
never drink beer at home. I’ve had
a beer or two every night in one of these places and it feels like it. Tonight I wanted to have different
tastes. Tonight I wanted a glass
of wine.
Mind you, I am still laden with a mountain of
must-do’s. But they don't pull at
the fabric of my comfort zone. So I
do not have time to go find the hippest fusion restaurant Shanghai has to offer
and insist that I already had a reservation with them under the name "Wu." I don’t really need to see nor be seen
this Saturday evening. I know I
need to write this, in my on going series of de contemptu omnium de mensa: Live from the next restaurant. And I’ve made my way to a chain
hotel Italian restaurant with overpriced, undercooked food that I would never
otherwise think to patronize. And
sitting here, with the atmosphere kept at bay by the samba in my big fat
headphones, it’s just about right.
Celestial bossa nova swinging about my ears complete with
what sounds like it must be a bass clarinet or a bassoon or something wooden
and deep. The song: “Nana” by Nara
Leao from the 1964 album “Nara.”
It’s a short piece at 2:04 with a simple, pared down arrangement of an approachable,
knowing melody. And her voice even
though she doesn’t utter one word, is utterly convincing. Like I suggested about Elliot Smith a
few entries back, and he’s in my mind because he accompanied me on the rainy
walk over here, when she sings this easy melody, I unquestioningly believe her. I’ve played it about six times in a row
now. It’s my newfound love and
it’s over well before it should be, each and every time.
She was known as the “muse of bossa nova” and I never knew
her. Like so many of the other
Brazilian musical luminaries of that time she left her home country during the
military dictatorship after developing an ever-greater political consciousness
within her work. (Would that I
could tell whether or not it is evidenced on this disc I’m currently enjoying.)
She settled in Paris in 1970 and shortly thereafter renounced her musical
career and turned to concentrate on parenting. Reading further
it hits dull, like it does when one reads about jazz luminaries, nearly one and
all, that they and she had died, mid-life, during a tangible moment of your own
consciousness, in this case: June
7, 1989.
This was three days after students were massacred in
Tiananmen Square. I can remember
reading the newspaper, sitting on the front stoop of the place, which was at
the time was my mother’s house.
June 5th, 1989, sitting there with the New York Times,
shaking my head trying to grapple with all that amorphous hope for a strange
people I knew nothing about other than that they were young and boldly
confronting authority which was what young people anywhere should be doing, and
I’d done and which had been building and building into something interesting
and was certainly inevitably veering towards triumph after all that had happened in the former Soviet
Union. Ignorant, we all knew how the movie would end until that
morning when they were all mowed off Square. And suddenly it didn’t make sense at all. What a strange impenetrable place China
seemed at that time.
I would have been waiting tables at the Village Gate fairly
soon thereafter and preparing to begin a stint as a teacher and I would be
living in New York City in my own place for the first time. And I would have been in a Tribeca
apartment that still smelled of the Cinnamon it used to warehouse and I’d have
been brushing my young teeth so vigorously that I’d slip and hurt myself every so often because everything was so fresh and energized and now, now. I know that wet soil, after the spring
rain atmospherics with everything just about to sprout. I wouldn’t have known a thing about
bossa nova at the time though I’d have enjoyed this then . . . two days before
Ms. Nara Leao died of an inoperable brain tumor.
[1] yǒushǐyǒuzhōng: where there's a start, there's a finish
(idiom); to finish once one starts sth / to carry things through / I started,
so I'll finish.
No comments:
Post a Comment