Sitting up in the old
neighborhood, one of many around the world.
This morning I’m back over in Bernal Heights at the Progressive Grounds
Café. Someone was to have met me here twenty
minutes ago. It looks like they aren’t
going to show. Packing in meeting after
meeting here where there is such a density of people to reconnect with. People talk of dramatic sifts but this place
hasn’t changed, to my eyes, at all.
I feel like I’m at my Quaker High School from my teenage
years. Informal wooden feel, with the
old couches and shelves with old toys and books wet with the years, all piled
up, over where my kids used to play.
Messy bulletin boards with a range of urgent causes, and an “its your kitchen”,
milk station. Masks and amulets and
plates suggesting West Africa, Central America, and the Middle East. Customers
speak to the community and causes committed and wealth earned and over there is
a couple going through the newspaper together.
What a lovely idea. I never do
that any more. The garden out back makes the scene.
Most U.S. cities have a place if not a surfeit of places
like this; a safe space for informality.
A genuine environment, not modeled on anything other than the owners and
the community’s agenda. Starbucks tries to capture and mass-produce something
of this feeling. I was going to say
something about how it’s been a while and I haven’t sat in an environment like
this in so long, but that’s nonsense. The
Bookworm serves this function in Beijing.
We’re lucky to have it.
It’s nice to hear lots of Spanish spoken everywhere. It stimulates memories buried under years of
Mandarin accretions. There is a sign for
Mitchell’s Ice Cream. The main store
used to be around the block from our house and we’d take the kids out for
scoops and scoops of amazing flavors like “Purple Ube”, which was a yam flavor
from the Philippines. I can recall
taking my girls there when they used to be the age of those little twins off to
my left hanging out with dad, while he has his coffee.
I’ve been riding around with the dial to KCSM and then over
to KPOO. This morning it was a little weak,
frankly. Keith Heinz “Morning Cup of
Jazz” was stuck on some Pat Matheny and then over to song about a broken heart
that didn’t seem very compelling to me.
I fiddled and spun over to KPOO and it was the Gospel Caravan which
could have been lifting but wasn’t. Now
there is some vaguely Gypsy Kings-like acoustic flailing up above. It isn’t working for me. That never really has.
Driving over here I looked up at the hill. Bernal was green. What’s all this about the worse drought in
years this winter? In the summer the
hill is barren. In the summer it smells
like the Bernal-urinal with all the dog piss along every path. Some other precipitation must have fallen,
even if it was mere merely the fog’s misting.
Everything certainly feels much more moist then Beijing here in
California’s drought country.
Off to my right a French father is having a moment. His son is melting down in the stroller. The daughter is loudly protesting on the
chair. The kid has been parked outside
and he is negotiating now, inside, with his daughter. He ‘d better get back out there soon. Parking your kind on the curb is never going
to fly with mom, Jean-Paul. OK, I’ve got
to head to another meeting, down in the Mission, over where you wouldn’t have
gone twenty years ago, that is roaring now, as we enter our century’s mid
teens.
I’d openly suggested the fears that terrorism was behind the
downing of the Malaysian airlines flight yesterday. But three days on and there is still no
confirmation. Perhaps it was just a
malfunction. I hadn’t realized that it
was very common for people to travel on fake passports. Even two fake passports on a flight, and it
still does not necessarily mean foul play.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight.html?hp
Back home at my friend’s apartment. Tired.
Coffee in the Mission, a drive to the East Bay on the brand spankin’ new
bridge, that looks now, a bit like every new bridge in Asia. The old hulking metal one, unpainted, off to
the side, looking so sad and forgotten.
I couldn’t describe the route, if forced to, but fortunately I remember
it as it unfolds before me, arching here and there, having done it so many
times, so many years ago.
Once again, made to sit precisely in front of the speakers
so as to really hear something, in
this case, what friends have been working on.
Then hours and hours adding layers and layers to spontaneously generated
piece of “music.” I’m horrible with the
minutia of recording but my friends have professional callouses and easily
paste down textures and beats till suddenly there is a little hothouse jungle
we’ve created. Humor is the main
objective with tracks like that and certainly we were laughing by the time it
was done.
Humor is all I have the chops to shoot for
spontaneously. I’ve got an album on now
that is more stately, recorded like so many, live at the Village Vanguard, in
2002 by the Illinois trumpet and flugelhorn player, Mr. Tom Harrell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Harrell
The tune: “Manhattan 3:00AM.” This I can envision along with the probing
bass line. Walking along in the dark, conscious of who is behind you. 熬更守夜[1], speeding through lights without
traffic. Seeing people begin to wind it
all down. And apropos of this, I’m
heading to bed.
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