My daughter wanted
help with downloading pictures from her iPhone on to her computer. For some reason the iPhoto app on the
computer doesn’t recognize the iPhone, which is otherwise charging. I try one or two obvious things that don’t
work and then am faced with a parental fork in the road: to solve or not to solve. Solving could take an additional five minutes
or an additional two hours. Who can say?
If it was imperative, I know what steps I’d begin taking, but isn’t this
more of a “nice to have?” Not to her, of
course. She needs it done now.
It's a holiday so my daughter’s are home which is great, but
otherwise it's a workday and this is the home office, which isn’t so
great. You want to model a can-do
approach and slowly illustrate how you’d go about solving the problem on your
own. Let’s define the problem, Google it
and find out what other people have said about it, trial those solutions,
etc. And you need to send out that email
and get back to that guy. It’s easy to
preach 业精于勤[1] but rather difficult to model.
Fortunately I plugged her iPhone into the MacBook Pro I am
currently typing on and it recognized the phone and began downloading her 1770
pictures without a hitch. Allow me to model, luck.
Listening to Leo Parker the bebop baritone sax player for
the first time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Parker The opening cut of this album “Let Me Tell
You About It”, is “Glad Lad” and it swings with infectious optimism. The baritone sound is so nice and fat and he
flies about, despite all the extra breath required to make it ring. Pictures suggest he was a handsome gent and I’m
sure he cut a mean figure up there with that big horn. This was billed as a big comeback record from
him, and you can feel the urgency and the hope. The session has a cast of cats none of whom,
I humbly confess, do I recognize:
Dave Burns - trumpet
Bill Swindell - tenor saxophone
Yusef Salim - piano
Stan Conover - bass
Purnell Rice – drums
Each one, a story.
Each gent, perhaps his own, recorded oeuvre to learn about, his own town
he hails from, his own migration path to New York and over across the river
that day to record at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio. Mr. Parker came up in Billy
Eckstein’s orchestra along with so many other seminal beboppers and alas, like
so many of them he too developed a habit.
He was out of commission; it seems for much of the 50s. And then, shortly after this and another
release in 1961, he had a heart attack and died at the age of 36. Looks like his birthday was the day before
mine. Glad to meet you Mr. Parker, a
second Parker, then, in the tradition.
How would jazz have been different without junk? Certainly not a few different notes, and
perhaps an entirely different vibe, but most assuredly we'd have had a whole lot of guys living
and playing longer than Leo’s 36, or Charlie’s 34.
Nations apply anesthetics somewhat differently than saxophone
players. Have a look at this editorial
in the New York Times about Germany, with the provocative title “Can Germany
Grow Up?” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/opinion/bittner-can-germany-grow-up.html?hp&rref=opinion Jochen Bittner discusses the largely domestic
debate in Germany which the President, Joachim Gauck, has stoked about whether
or not Germany can reform the manner in which it contributes troops
overseas. My mind is there in Germany,
as I’m backpacking across the country in the 1930s with Patrick Leigh Fermor,
in the remarkable “A Time of Gifts.”
Prewar Germany is, surprise, filled with a host of genuine, welcoming
people who are fun to drink and sing songs with and are quite attractive when
they haven’t lost their front teeth in a bar fight. More on this text and the remarkable author
in a future posting.
But what is remarkable about the editorial is that the
handwringing about this decision to “grow up” is largely internal. No one else in Europe seems overly concerned
with Germany taking a more proactive stand, militarily. There are, certainly individuals a-plenty
with things to say. But at the level of state-to-state relations, the notion
seems to be welcomed. Israel may perhaps
articulate something less than positive, but in general there is appears a
broad sense of the benefits to be had, if Germany were to “pull its weight,” rather
than worries of them asserting themselves improperly.
And of course, we live in a neighborhood where this is not
the case. Japan is also good at ringing
its hands on the question of a more assertive military posture and this, to me,
is healthy, up to a point. But China,
North Korea and South Korea are anything but ambivalent, let alone supportive
of such a notion. And there is a library
shelf's worth of differences between the two countries and circumstances, but I’d
like to know how an article like this reads in Tokyo.
Japan can complain about how China is using history as an
opportunistic lever and there is some truth in this. They can dismiss North Korea as a
kleptocratic prison state. But what
about South Korea? Are they simply sour
sports? Neither the enormous neighbor,
nor the smaller neighbors trust you Japan.
At some point Japan must ask itself what it can do differently beyond
making outreach to India. Just as China
tries to drive a wedge between South Korea and the U.S., Japan could do the
same. If reckoning with China is too
overwhelming, couldn’t you at least make good faith efforts with South Korea to
address genuine complaints, rather than pretend they are settled and
anachronistic? If the editorial is
correct, Germany’s next phase of maturation is Germany vs. Germany. Imagine a North Asia where immediate
neighbors actually encouraged Japan to contribute more to regional and global
defense. Rich, stable, with freedoms
long guaranteed, Japan should make the first move. If only it could. Perhaps South Korea then, will be the one that
innovates itself out of this dead-end first.
[1] Yèjīngyúqín: mastery
of study lies in diligence (idiom). You can only master a subject by assiduous
study. / Excellence in work is only possible with diligence. / Practice makes
perfect.
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