My
stepson is back in town again this morning, from a biz trip down in
Tianjin. My daughters are
happy. He had it in his head to
take them to the planetarium today.
They’ll have a blast. I had
two calls with two old friends and then I went to make some eggs and bacon for
the kids as one does on a slow, Saturday morning. They all wanted fried eggs, sunny side up, over easy. I couldn’t crack an egg for breaking
the yolk. Batting 1 for 3 or so,
on average with lots of attendant sticking of yolk-to-pan as a result. Slam hard, tap gentle, it didn’t
matter, the yolk would ooze across the pan. At one point I took to cursing the eggs as “Chinese eggs”,
until I realized this was dumb. No
one else seemed to mind. Certainly
broken-yolk breakfast was not 鸡飞蛋打[1].
One of my old friends whom I was speaking to earlier
recently lost his father. It was
sudden, a complete surprise and he’s been coping now for some time. We spoke about this. He described the feeling of stopping mid-evening
sometimes, looking around, and wondering if his dad was there, somewhere. Is the spirit pulsating beyond
corporality or is it that those who are gone are simply a memory, a fading
imprint of their impact on other sentient consciousness?
A different friend of the same vintage shared a wonderful
list of classic Brazilian popular music from the 50s through to
contemporary. Dozens of people
I’ve never heard before, gorgeous, evocative album covers that make me wish I
could hold the physical record jacket and not simply consider the digital
image. Sometimes Rdio has the
specific album recommended and sometimes they have a smattering of other things
from the person’s oeuvre to explore.
Such is the case with João Donato who’s 1968 album “Quem é quem?” is
profiled. Unable to find it I ran
through a number of his other works and settled upon “A Blue Donato” from two
years later, as speaking to whatever it was my mood was this morning. I think I was craving space, which the
song “Tom Thumb” had its hands around.
Born in Rio Branco in 1934 he came up in the fifties, as a
pianist, leading his own band by 1952.
Later in the decade, based in Sao Paulo he seems to have had a notable
influence on Joao Gilberto as Bosa Nova was beginning to take off. The Wiki page on the man, that seems to
be translated from Portuguese states “João Gilberto himself said here and there
that he had picked up his revolutionary guitar beat while watching Donato play
the piano.” Later he lived in the
US and recorded with West Coast jazz figures and later some funky experimental
creations which, alas, I can’t seem to find easily.
Writing now in a crowded Starbucks in Wang Jing. Upstairs my wife has a store in the
department store that she is supplying goods for. I lugged some colanders upstairs and hung out for a bit but
eventually bid a polite retreat to the ground floor and an afternoon
espresso. This place is always
crowded but it is worse today, because, like the Starbucks I was in down in
Shanghai two days ago, there are piles and piles of cardboard boxes full of
moon-cakes, presumably at the ready to hand out as lucky fruit-cake to whoever
comes by tomorrow.
I finished Saramago’s “The Gospels According to Jesus
Christ” last night. Apparently it
caused quite an uproar that ended up in him moving out of Portugal and into
Spain. I must be far too gone as a
skeptic to see much of any offence in this work. Christ, the human, is handled gently, thoughtfully. The Devil too gets a measured
treatment. It is God Himself, who
is plotting, approachable, comprehensible, which is perhaps the sin the Church
took most offence at.
I did find it interesting to trace the narrative aspect of
Christ’s life, from the Immaculate Conception, and allow myself to feel the
power of the story, rather than have to embrace or cast scorn on the miraculous
articles of faith. I’ll have to go back to the original text some day and ride
the Gospels narrative with a fresh pair of eyes. Short of say the Iliad and the Odyssey, it's the most important
written text in western civilization.
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