Squares Full Circle

The Ukraine as a country, always seemed very difficult to understand.  How could it hold together with such a fundamental ethnic division running like a slash, across the land? Nearly 20% of the country identifying themselves as ethnic Russian.  Jobs, affinities, traditions, marriages all settled with a Soviet overlay, shaken and left exposed for the last twenty years.  It has seemed from a distance that every other president was throwing his or her predecessor in jail or worse, poisoning them so their face deteriorates.  My own understanding, woefully inadequate.  And we watch while another capital square, Tiananmen Square, Tahrir Square and now Independence Square in Kiev, is occupied by protestors, occupied by the world media and then violently cleared.  The disturbance appears to be spreading across the country.  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/20/world/europe/ukraine.html?hp

Putin supporting the government.  I’m sure if you’d voted for President Yanukovych, or perhaps it is as simple as if you were ethnically Russian, you’d be aghast at Molotov cocktails and mob rule and similarly deride the opposition as “terrorists” or “brown shirts” in quite the same fashion.  But if you saw your “independent” country thwarted from any attempt to get closer to Western Europe.  If you felt, in your heart that the ruling party was elected in a rigged fashion, that you were still hostage to an occupying minority, well, then it would be clear where your sympathies would lie.  Western Europe, the United States all seem impotent to do anything more than intone the importance of restraint. 

Looking at pictures of protestors occupying the freezing capital city center and of emptying government offices of files and burning them in the streets of provincial towns, my mind can’t but look around me here, and think about 1989 and think about the provincial towns I know myself, where there is frustration, albeit, not ethnic, per se, but not far from a flash point and, always, particularly inflammable.  The president has now replaced most of the top generals.  How loyal are the top brass here, to one or another leader of the Party, should they ask a General to take a fall, or do something vile?  And then there are the warnings to Americans, for example, from the State Departmen stay indoors for the next few days.  Will we ever get the same directive here?

On a more commercial note, Facebook has bought WhatsApp, for $16B dollars.  I remember downloading it on a friend’s suggestion about 1.5 years ago.  I’ve never used it once.  I purposefully avoid Facebook itself so now it is a closed circle of relative irrelevance for me. I know you think you’ve secured me Mark, but I'm remaining an 'inactive' user.  I’ve written how I’ve been reluctantly drawn into using WeChat “weixin” instead, which everyone insists is far cooler, though I'd be hard pressed to explain why.

There is going to be such an absurd concentration of gazillionaires based in the Bay Area with all this activity and fortunately for those working in the tech space, I suppose there is no immediate end in site to this latest cresting. Long live the creative disruption.  But with every blow-up like this, the more likely I suppose that the Bay Area is going to become a wealth ghetto as much as it will be any great center of international innovation.   Expect more bus-blockings.  Will we ever have Facebook or Google occupied?  http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/facebook-to-buy-messaging-start-up/?hp

My wife is cranking Aretha Franklin in the other room doing her stretches.  Sounds cool, but I can’t write with it on.  The lyrics pull me away.  I’ve got my big old headphones on.  Jimmy Heath is today's encounter.  “Little Bird” originally started out on alto and switched to the big tenor and he sounds lovely on this 1959 release, “The Thumper” with his own sextet.  I came to him by way of Howard McGee the trumpeter of whom I’ve written.  I was back into his lovely “Dusty Blue” album, which I threw on for dinner the other night. 

Jimmy and his famous jazz brothers bassist Percy Heath and drummer Albert Heath, were all born in Philadelphia, where the hard blowing Ted Curson, whom I’d mentioned two or three days back is also from.  This version of “Don’t You Know I Care?” has it all slowed down for him to explain to me what he means.  Wynton Kelly fills in on keys with splashes of prismatic color and his brother on drums and Paul Chambers on bass seem so familiar with establishing this utterly convincing melancholy.  They say he briefly replaced Coltrane in Miles orchestra and while he doesn’t sound like Trane per se, there is a certain lasting clarity to his notes that lingers, not unlike the way Coltrane was known for.  Here’s to another veteran of the tradition who still walks the earth.  Something for this summer, when I’m back home, if I can still catch the man.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Heath

I’ve had two cups of pretty strong coffee this morning but I’m still dragging.  Not sure why.  Been to the gym, took my shower had my meditation and my smoothie.  I think this drumbeat is the only thing that is really keeping me from just curling up with a book and dozing off. I was reading the other day about how a Spain struggling with stratospheric unemployment at home is taking a hard look at the midday siesta.   Is it just a Franco era anachronism?  From this chair it sounds rather timely. It’s that or another pot of coffee here at this particular home office.  I have it in me to 废寝忘食[1] for a while, but not coffee.  When China was a strictly tea-drinking culture, there must have been a lot more napping.   Yawn.  I think the new pot’s ready. 

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[1] fèiqǐnwàngshí:  to neglect sleep and forget about food (idiom) / to skip one's sleep and meals / to be completely wrapped up in one's work