With Backing Bands Sound Systems

I settled on an increasingly familiar mind space this morning, “I’m getting old.”  The reason?  I was trying to do my meditation and suddenly realized that my legs were much more uncomfortable than usual.  And as I tried to reckon with the numbness and the stiffness that had somehow suddenly overwhelmed me I reached for the timer.  I must have been asleep for the last half hour, hunched over, legs extended. 

I began to recall that my mind had been involved in old west train robbery “take the stuff and dispose of it” I’d been telling someone on board, and so it was suddenly quite obvious that I hadn’t been actively concentrating on nothingness, but rather, was pursuing absurd things that only happen in a dream space.   And now I understood my sore legs and reckoned with the implications of being “seventeen minutes late” now in my morning routine.  At least I could return to thinking I was 老当益壮[1]

When I was still conscious I can recall hearing my friend the four-note bird, from a few posts back, off in the distance.  He was over yonder as it were and I could tell it would be pointless to try to record him on the iPhone.  Sitting now a few hours later, what sound like a feeding-flock of adamant chickadees are piping up from a dozen different places.  I went to the window to look, but could only see one or two of the small brown birds and nothing else.

I have always had a sturdy collection of Jamaican music.  And have always been aware that there is a nearly limitless amount that remained, to be discovered.  Last summer, an old friend who is effectively an ethnomusicologist with a focus on Jamaican music, shared with me his six or so CD ROMs with about one gig each worth of old Jamaican singles.  It has been said that the Jamaican population of 2.7 million souls is the most well-recorded group of people proportionally, on earth.  I dumped this trove of six gigs of precious fruit into my iTunes and have been sampling away on a random mix ever since.  Nearly two-thirds of this hoard is new and fresh to discover.   

Who was Ken Boothe?  The first time I would have heard his name mentioned is by Joe Strummer when he sang his and other Jamaican luminary names in “White Man in Hammersmith Palais.”  Born in Kingston in 1948, billed as Mr. Rocksteady, I was already familiar with Ken’s “Everything I Own” and “The Train is Coming”, when this mix served up a song that I assume was recorded around 1968, one of the last years with full, undiluted positive messages such as this.  Boothe recorded with all the great Jamaican producers like Duke Reid, Clement "Coxsone" Dodd, and the remarkable Chinese Jamaican producer Leslie Kong.  Looking on line I found what must be an earlier version that is also soulful, and must be from about two years earlier.  Remarkable to hear the evolution of the sound from just these two versions.  Mr. Rocksteady was awarded the Jamaican “Order of Distinction” in 2003 for his contribution to Jamaican music, by the Jamaican government.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ausBx-TTMfg&feature=kp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-TqO7xMw_s

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/entertainment/Leslie-Kong-s-reggae-pioneer_11989294

Yesterday, we had yet another terrorist attack in Xinjiang.  Thirty-one people were killed when two SUVs filled with explosives crashed into a market place in Urumqi.  It is hard to understand what the planning meeting must be like where people decide to blow up a market filled mostly with older women shopping for vegetables, ethnically Chinese and Uighur alike.  How does slaughtering this particular cohort in any way advance a cause?   Clearly it invokes a reaction, and in some heartless Machiavellian way, perhaps this is enough for some, but it also absolutely invokes widespread and utter revulsion.  It certainly feels like its’ gonna get worse before it gets better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/world/asia/deadly-attack-in-western-china.html?contentCollection=world&action=click&module=NextInCollection&region=Footer&pgtype=article

A heated but thus far fortunately less incandescent chess game is also taking place around cyber security between my and my host country.  China was not very happy to see five PLA men in uniform appear in FBI “Wanted” posters.  The State Internet and Information Office have announced new procedures to assess security risks implicit from foreign technology, making it yet again harder for large U.S. companies like Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco to sell domestically.   And, as always, this creates an opportunity for those nimble companies who innovate or partner in such a way to navigate this impasse, to succeed in a manner difficult for the largest firms to do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/world/asia/china-threatens-security-checks-for-tech-firms-after-us-indictments.html?ref=asia

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[1] lǎodāngyìzhuàng:  old but vigorous (idiom); hale and hearty despite the years