A More Expressive Language?

Last night my stepson and his wife were over for dinner.  My wife had brought home this remarkable, dark green doufu from her younger brother’s restaurant.  Cooked, it looked oddly like cubes of lamb but the taste was certainly bean curd.  Soybeans are green after all.  To make the white doufu we are used to the little green seeds inside the maodou must necessarily be bleached the same way rice is to change it from its natural brown color to the bowl of white rice we’d otherwise expect.   

I just went and checked with my wife, breezily stating what I “knew” per what  just wrote above, and she told me, not for the first time, that I am wrong.  This batch of doufu was made from a special, dark bean. I will need to look to see whether regular soy beans are bleached to make white tofu. I suspect that may still be right.  

I’ve written before about the music swapping routine we often descend into around here.  A new person or two can fill things widely out from the predictable.  My stepson, was new to the routine.  He threw on Green Day from his time as a fifteen-year-old.  I remember my younger brother being into them back in the nineties, as well.  Now, like then, they sound derivative and not particularly compelling to me, but considering all the other people in the room who wouldn’t have known anything about Punk’s evolution to Hardcore’s evolution to Grunge, I’m sure this sounds quite similar to anything I’d throw on by the Buzzcocks.  Besides, he was having a blast and I did my best to enjoy it through his eyes. 

My daughter-in-law, whose mother tongue is Cantonese came up with some Canto hip-hop that none of us had otherwise considered.  Jin is a Chinese American rapper from New York.  I think I dug his first album, “The Rest is History” but I don’t think he had any extended sessions in Cantonese.  Is there a more expressive language?  Certainly, it seemed to afford some remarkable possibilities in Hip Hop and more importantly, my daughter-in-law was thrilled.   When it was her turn again, she found a battle between Jin and some kid from the U.K. in which the prior mopped up the latter (in English).  We all cheered. 

I’d had a confrontation with “Quadrophenia” during the morning routine at the gym when “The Real Me” suddenly came on and I’d a residue of the Who all day, that I hadn’t quite shaken yet.  Interestingly both the girls immediately noted that Keith Moon looked like Monty Python’s Terry Jones during the “Who Are You” video where his earphones are duct taped up on to his head and he gesticulates and snarls so wonderfully.  Later I took a risk and played the Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard epic duel from the live “Pensitiva,” which I’d written about last week.  “Baba, that’s a twenty-two-minute song!”  “I’m only going to play a few minutes of it . . .”  And though my daughter’s had already checked out on attentive listening, my daughter-in-law dutifully gave it a go and I tried to explain that it was just like Jin dueling in his battle, it’s all from the same tradition. 

Friday 02/15/19