Thursday, August 7, 2014

Dream Foundries with Papal Accompaniment




Flying down now over Mongolia, en route from the North Pole.  We left New York and shot straight north for Greenland and just kept on going.  I am used to the route from the west coast over Alaska and down Siberia.  The journey may as well be across the Antarctic for all I ever get to see of any of this territory.  Still, the map is up there in front of me, flashed on and off the screen every few minutes so it demands consideration.



I’ve had a fabulously unique album on the ears as I’ve flown, dozed off, woken up, committed to meditating and fallen right to sleep again.  Tenor player Odean Pope is someone I’ve long been a big fan of.  For a long time I only had cuts of his like “Knot it Off” from the late 90s, that I loved.  I knew he had a reputation as an avant gard maverick but I only had one album to consider and for some reason his other work always proved tough to find.  (I’ve just looked up that he had formerly played with Max Roach and was part of the band “Catalyst” whom I’ve already started digging into.)  A few years back I found a live album of his with the saxophone choir he lead that is phenomenal.  Now I am probably eight listens into this completely distinct gesture “The Misled Children Meet Odean Pope.” 

I can’t tell you much about the prior.   I’ll have to look up if “The Misled Children” is a metaphor or an actual group.  (It’s the latter.)  This has a slick contemporary production, with a hip hop drum underlay, astro-slick production fills and then, of course, Odean pope and absolutely incomparable, proper jazz fills where slick samples might otherwise be.  The tune “Foregone” starts out with a porcine bass hook and a classic Odean Pope rich orchestral horn slices.  The initial break is soulful and sparse and then drops down minimally to play around with an acoustic guitar.  I’ve never had the patience for production work myself, though I certainly appreciate the mastery of capturing an aural vision in a compelling way and of making something that manages to mix and push what had otherwise seemed unimaginable, into the possible.

OK.  I am about to get propositioned for “chicken or the beef?”  I’m not a broad cloth table.  (It was “noodles or egg” and I chose the latter.”)  Two tracks later on this album, we’re into a song called the “Laugh Truck” this has a disturbing line of laughter, not unlike “Dark Side of the Moon” and guitar fills that evoke Gong’s “Angles’ Egg.”  But when he plays, these classic four note geometric patters over and over it could only be Odean Pope.  I will look deeper into who is on it and when it was made, after I land.  I could say 2004 or 2014 (It was 2008.) and I’d really be hard pressed to distinguish much of what is possible when we consider the last fifteen years.  Before that I could probably place things accurately decade by decade for the century that proceeded.

Some people make a big deal out of the Financial Times and while I’ve always enjoyed the paper, and usually run into it on flights like this, it certainly isn’t something I reach for over the International Herald Tribune, though perhaps I should.  I lifted a copy boarding the plane off the cart they had in the Business Class section.  The front page had a remarkable article entitled “Beijing Invites the U.S. to Link Up Over Africa.”  There is a huge damn project in the Congo in particular that Beijing would, it seems, would like to cooperate with the U.S. in building.  To my eyes this in unequivocally good news.

This gesture dovetails nicely with the U.S. own belated realization that most of the world’s fastest growing economies are now in Africa and that it has ceded ground of what should be obvious leadership, to China.  China, meanwhile, is slowly learning that investing without concern for the caliber of political leadership means it is difficult to secure much of anything reliably from that investment.  Lately our two countries have been 一盘散沙[1].  That China has chosen to reach out at this juncture despite a minefield of divisive issues around cyber security and regional defense challenges speaks to leadership and astute three-dimensional chess.  The U.S. and the Obama administration should be looking for ways, outside of the predictable areas of discontent to do something remarkable for the world.  Neither the American dream nor the China dream is right for Africa.  But rather than a new, facile, cold war of somnombulance, both sides could cooperate to allow countries and regions in the continent opportunities to break through in the development of their own dream foundries. 



I could go on about the FT.  There was a detailed article on Wang Qishan, China’s new anti-graft czar, whom I’ve read about before in, say the New York Times, but never learned nearly so much about.  (Links to the FT though are useless w/o a subscription) A historian with a sense of humor, who assigns staff De Tocqueville to read, I’m more intrigued than I had been to learn more about this man with the meatiest brief in town.  An article about Merkel and Putin similarly left me with a much deeper sense of the two, than I perhaps have ever had before.  (They both speak the other’s language, fluently . . .)  I’ll be grabbing this publication with more relish in the future.

Finally, I had an epiphany as I considered this DustyBrine effort mid-flight and that is this: Dusty Brine is not, simply “A Twentieth Year of China” as I have long considered for a working title.  But rather it is an odd, wilful effort of living one whole year, publicly.  Not, as one might with a reality TV cameral in your face, every moment as you visit the toilet and scratch you feet.  Obviously, it is only a reckoning of what I want to share.  But I will have poke around and see if anyone has claimed the 365-day in a row reckoning, genre to-date.  A year of thought, in a set, pattern, documented and shared publically.  Thoughts are on this way, because, with only about forty-five days or so to go, the end of the experiment is within view.  This cadence isn’t sustainable for life, certainly not a life with more than writing as a vocation.  Soon, I will introduce something new in its place.  But this process has become quite familiar and it will be odd, to suddenly not be capturing thought this way.   I look forward to considering the packaging.







[1] yīpánsǎnshā: lit. like a sheet of loose sand / fig. unable to cooperate (idiom)

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