Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Rain Came Midnight




I’ve a remarkable piece of music on that I’ve been playing over and over since I first came across it last week.  The drummer Roy Brooks and the Artistic Truth have an album from 1973 called “Ethnic Expressions” that is phenomenal.  I’ve got M’jumbe on and it's a gorgeous broad plane of activity with Reggie Workman and Roy Brooks both anchoring the vessel and providing it velocity.  The head is fat and memorable.  Beautiful.  The next song I like even more.  And the culminating “Eboness” is  as confrontational as it is inspirational.  And I liked it a lot but was floored to learn later that the lady behind the voice was none other than Ms. Dee Dee Bridgwater, who’m I’ve long known, but not in this Angela Davis meets Jello Biafra incarnation. 

Born in Detroit in 1938, Mr. Brooks came up in the 60s, playing with a constellation of bop luminaries and remarkable sets, including Horace Silver’s “Songs for My Father.”   After time with Mingus’ Big Band he launched the “Artistic Truth.”  The song I referred to up above, “The Last Prophet” is one of the most buoyant expressions I can remember hearing in a long time.  What a lovely sound.  Apparently Roy Brooks was challenged with depression and fought it through his later years.  He died in a nursing home in Detroit in 2005 at the age of 67.



Argument last night.  My older daughter has an iPhone.  Her main communication platform like four hundred other million people in China is through “we chat.”  Her messages with her friends are in Chinese.  I could technically work through and read any such message with a bit of a slog.  But, and bad on me, I rely on my wife.   Last night at dinner my wife was insisting that she needed password access to my daughter’s phone.  I’d assumed she had it.  My daughter suggested that if she must provide it, it meant that we didn’t trust her.  Surprised that this was even up for debate I said, “done.  Provide the password or the phone.  If you want a private space, I will not read your journal.  But you can’t have private access to the internet.”

And upon considering 18 hours later, I am still rather clear in my mind that this is a no-brainer default, for basic safety.  It is clear we have to have a talk about what “trust” is and dive into the perennial chasm of “you don’t understand how my generation communicates.”  True.  Nor will you fare any better with your offspring.  I spoke about it with my wife this morning and she said she saw our daughter, who for now surrendered the phone, rather than the password, squirreling away in a journal.  Hard not to feel that this was not an undeniably positive thing. 



Huge rain last night.  We’d been waiting for it all day.  I went out in the morning with an umbrella in anticipation of being dumped on.  I scheduled all my meetings one place so I wouldn’t be caught running around in the downpour.  I decided not to stay to meet some people because it would have been a nightmare getting a cab in the pouring rain.  But the clouds just gathered and the humidity built until around midnight with no rain and then it broke.  The crackle of thunder.  In the distance lightning cuts horizontal.  My wife and I went out and stood beneath the leaves and felt all the drops become 滂沱大雨[1].









[1] pāngtuódàyǔ:  torrents of rain (idiom)

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