We
didn’t hear much from Fido last night.
He’s barking now, but its daytime.
Monday is well underway in Beijing and emails with to-dos and inquiries
and demands a plenty are filling up my inbox. I’ll make my way over to my nearby three-star Presidente hotel lobby and settle in for
a rendez vous with the
obligatory.
I’m not sure if I’ve profiled Mr. Leon Spencer before. I’ve got the tune “Where I’m Coming
From” on and he’s ever so tastefully applying his fingers to the keys, and
Grady Tate, whom I’ll have to explore later, is pushing him onward just so on
the drums that my wife started to get-down as she was searching for her
shirt. Such is the irresistible
power of ripe funky music. The next three tunes on this seem to be some covers I’m
less interested in taking on.
Still, sitting there in my breast pocket, singing out from my iPhone,
it’s helping this morning. There’s
lite obit on the man that recommends an album that Rdio doesn’t have but I
found on Youtube called “Louisiana Slim” that has the incomparable Idris
Muhammad on drums. Yes, this is
helping.
It helped yesterday too, walking around in the local
Supermarket. With the wife down
joining we offered to make a “Chinese” dinner. This meant an afternoon trip over to the local shopping
mall. It’s my third time there and
somehow whatever anthropological buzz a curious mind might romance out of such
a visit to a mall at the other end of Eurasia, has all been tapped. It’s a supermarket. Everyone else inside looked tired
too. We got some ribs, we got some
soy sauce. We couldn’t find any
ginger. I knew where the tonic
water was and the espresso place on the second floor. I took to just having Grant Green accompany me, sitting
there in my breast pocket and Idris Muhammad was doing his thing in
accompaniment. I think I want to sample everything that man played drums on for a few years there.
Most of the day was on the home front though, playing ‘Marco
Polo’ and ‘Sharks and Minnows’ in the pool, and reading. I set out to do it yesterday and by
late evening had managed to finish this second volume of A.R. Disney’s “A
History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire.” I know so many of these pieces from other threads: the role of Macao in Chinese history,
the importance of Goa in Asian history, the fact that half a dozen African
countries speak Portuguese, the fact that “oh yeah, East Timor speaks
Portuguese as well,” the vague remembrance that it was the Portuguese who were
kicked out of Nagasaki when Tokugawa Iwase came to power and that, incidentally,
there is that enormous Portuguese-speaking country in South America.
Obviously, I’ve never traced the thread of their particular
imperial development before from a Portuguese perspective and reading along as
they laced a string of forts around Africa, the Persian Gulf, India, South East
Asia, up into China and Japan, before even heading over to Recife in the
America’s it is a singularly remarkable progression. Other Europeans follow of course, and they and the local Arab
rulers and Indian rulers and the Shogunate all chip away at Portugal’s imperial
tapestry. Melaka falls to the
Dutch, three hundred thousand Japanese Christian converts in Honshu are ordered
to cease and desist, the British offer their “help” against Napoleon and wind
up with the good harbor of Bombahia or Bombay. But improbably,
many, many possessions that nearly slip, somehow remained Portuguese, time and
time again, like a 铁树开花[1]
The tale Disney tells draws to a close around the time of
Napoleon’s defeat. Before coming
I’d looked for something to help explain nineteenth century Portugal. I didn’t see anything obvious, but it’s
clear that while Brazil achieves independence in the late nineteenth century,
most of the other colonies remain Portuguese well into the late twentieth
century. So today I begin, Al J.
Venter’s “Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa, Lisbon’s Three Wars in Angola,
Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea 1961 – 74,” which I found searching Amazon. It’s a major chapter of Africa’s
de-colonization that once again, I really know nothing about.
[1] tiěshùkāihuā: lit.
the iron tree blooms (idiom) / a highly improbable or extremely rare occurrence
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