Chopping, Baking, Basting, Stirring

My work routine does not involve a Sir Topham Hat.  I am fortunate to be able to work from home, mostly, sitting amongst my books, with my screen saver showing pictures of my family, music that I deem necessary sounding out at whatever volume I choose.  And though there isn’t a monopoly man anywhere, extracting my marrow I, like many of us, prove to be my own worst overseer.  There is never really a day when the work is ever done. 

So, I am thankful for this day, when tradition transcends geography or nationality.  It is the fourth Thursday of November and though it won’t be restful, I will not be banging out emails today or driving across town to meet anyone today, nor tomorrow either.  Instead, cooking.  Chopping, baking, basting, stirring to a fevered crescendo, and the final gesture, whisking the floor into the gravy and announcing that it’s time to eat.

We have done this for decades now.  That seems impossible, but it’s true.  If I am home it necessarily means mom’s house.  I wouldn’t dare to try to compete on that level.  But I haven’t been home for this holiday since what, 1997 or so?  Exempting the places I lived where we didn’t have an oven, Hong Kong and Beijing in the late 90s’ we’ve always invited lots of friends, particularly those who don’t celebrate the holiday, over to our house for a feast. 

Here in Beijing it has been every year, certainly since 2007 or so.  Every year I look up the old email from mom with a recipe or two.  What’s the preheat temperature?  What’s the pounds-to-time-in-the-oven calculation?  Every year I do the same dishes.  Every year some of the same people come by.  Some are colleagues.  Some are parents of children’s friends.  And every year the alumnae of Thanksgivings past who’ve moved on to San Mateo or Boca Raton, send a text back wishing us well on the day. 

In my mind’s tongue, it is important to segregate on this day.  Keep it hearty and relatively bland.  Any other day I love to experiment with Indian tastes, or Italian tastes, Japanese nori or Sichuanese peppercorns.  But not today.  This should be a meal my maternal grandmother would have liked, with butter and potatoes rather than garlic or kimchi.  Some friends ask if they can bring anything.  Bring some wine if you must.  But this shouldn’t be a potluck with a potpourri of tastes.  I want tight control on the palate range orchestration. 

Thankful then, on this day of stressful rest.  With family and friends safe.  And the insistence of my own mind at bay for a little while.

Friday 11/20/18

Only Birds From Chile

Reading the New York Times this morning I found myself in Chile. I am defrosting a sixteen-pound turkey which the local market biked over yesterday.  Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I don’t usually think much about buying-American.  But two years ago, I’d also secured a bird that turned out to be from the southern cone.  I was surprised, at the last minute to find their innards weren’t there inside.  You need the neck, the heart, the liver to make your gravy.  I think I even remember telling the owner of the store: “Chilean turkeys are no good.”

And the next year, last year, we had a U.S. bird.  It had guts.  I was happy with that.  There’s a nice bald gent at the market who knew I’d be needing one and he set me up with a preorder a few weeks back.  “I’ll take the biggest one you got.”   But when I insisted that the bird be a Yankee doodle dandy he threw up his hands.  “Only birds from Chile this year.”  “Really?”  And before I could ask “what’s up with that?” we both smiled and nodded our heads, and said “trade war” as if on cue.

The New York Times, however was not talking about trade war, nor about turkeys in this article.  Rather it was an expose on a strikingly handsome Chilean folk singer: Victor Jara.  I began to read the article and wondered how it was I’d never heard of this gentleman.  Every country it seems, or certainly dozens have some figure who was the Bob Dylan of (insert your country of choice) Russia’s Dylan.  The Dylan of the Philippines.  If the Czech Republic had a Dylan figure it was . . .   Quickly though it was clear that this was more than simply another such article. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/18/us/victor-jara.html

Victor Jara was one of many young people rounded up after Pinochet, with help from the Nixon administration toppled the elected government of Salvador Allende.  Jara was imprisoned in the stadium and segregated out, interrogated and shot, twice in the head, forty-four times elsewhere.  His wife, a British born Joan Jara received word from someone who had seen him in the morgue. 

The video provided, describes how eight members of the Chilean military have only now been brought to justice for the crime while the commander of unit there at the stadium, who denies any involvement in the murder, lives today in Florida.  Ms. Jara in particular, provides a loving, sober, somber account of her husband’s music, his life, and what it was it was sacrificed for.  I sent the link off to a best friend immediately asking: “how is it we never heard of him?”

I spent the day then, listening to Mr. Jara’s music.  I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy beyond the first toes’ wetting but he’s wonderful, sparse, surprising, anchored with a martyr’s gravity.  Biking in the early morning, shopping for Thanksgiving groceries in the afternoon chopping parsley and cilantro in the evening, I couldn’t get enough.  Deciphering glimpses of lucidity from the Spanish I could decipher, thought I understood the meaning of a song titled: “El Derecho a Vivir En Paz.”  “Derecho” the right.  Certainly, this was an ironic song about the right wing who , wont be in peace until they have destroyed society or killed all of the opposition!

Rather, the “right” in Spanish, like in English has both the directional significance as well as the idea of entitlement.  I have the “right” to free speech and freedom of assembly and, in this song at least, the right to live in peace.  It is a song about Ho Chi Minh and the struggle from that time in Vietnam. 

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/el-derecho-de-vivir-en-paz-right-live-peace.html

The Right To Live In Peace

The right to live

poet Ho Chi Minh,

who struck from Vietnam

all of humanity.

No cannon will wipe out

the furrow of your rice paddy.

The right to live in peace.

Indochina is the place

beyond the wide sea,

where they ruin the flower

with genocide and napalm.

The moon is an explosion

that blows out all the clamor.

The right to live in peace.

Uncle Ho, our song

is fire of pure love,

it's a dovecote dove,

olive from an olive grove.

It is the universal song

chain that will triumph,

the right to live in peace.

Wednesday, 11/20/18

Maybe It's Not That

All my mates are talking about the new re-release of the White Album, with hours of outtakes and extra tracks. It’s available on Spotify, so I can throw it on any time I like.  Coming up the stairs into the high school gym this morning, I decide to engage and soon the familiar airplane landing of “Back in the USSR” is filling my mind with memories of being ten years old and jumping off a stand in our basement, air-guitaring along with the song.

The first cuts are just remasters of the originals.  I kept straining to hear anything different on this ever-so-intimate terrain.  Someone had said they had a new appreciation for Ringo’s drum work but I couldn’t discern anything especially other.  Pulling weights to strain the muscles beneath my stomach’s perennial paunch I got lost, as one does in “Yer Blues.”  It didn’t sound any different from the way it always sounds.  But it always sounds devastating and I let myself listen to John’s witty, wrenching, suicidal word play, screaming out for help.  He, the one who is on top of the world, who can seemingly do anything and is desired by everyone, who is telling us all, he wants to end it.

Riding home I did finally enjoy something I don’t think I’ve ever heard before.  Certainly the bravest, most indecipherable journey of the two album set, “Revolution Number Nine” was also something I listened to over and over as a ten year old.  I wasn’t jumping off make believe stages listening to the song.  Rather, I, as John intended, wondered what was going on in this post-modern, post-canticle, post Rock n’ Roll gesture.  There is one section of the song right around minute seven, where all goes quiet and John says: ‘Take this brother, may it serve you well.” And a series of piano chords follow, that sound a bit like the opening piano of “My Guitar Gently Weeps” and seems for a moment that some sort of rocking cohesion would follow.  I absolutely wanted that as a ten-year-old, but it disappears quickly like a familiar shape dissolves in shifting clouds.  Indeed Yoko’s voice that follows the collapse is clear on the matter: “Maybe, it’s not that.”

And with the earbuds up in my head, pedaling along, in the day light now, I could make out far more clearly than I ever had before the consistent tracks of spoken word, by John and by George.  I had always thought that they were mixed in somewhat randomly.  But on this listen it appears that somewhere around minute one, their tracks are relatively consistent and provide a warm anchoring.  John’s voice in particular, is so deep, like an echoing baritone stitching warm, protean nonsense together like a carpet under the cacophony.  George, the partner in lysergic crime is also far more consistently represented than I’d otherwise remembered warming the track with Beatle friendship, smirks and wry humor beyond the obvious freedom John enjoyed, to experiment wildly with Yoko. 

I was home before I could dig into all the other outtake tracks.  It’ looks like there are four times as many more songs to explore and hear anew and remember being ten years old with.

Tuesday 11/20/18

Again, Despite His Regrets

Used the springboard of our evening with Diego Ramirez, Lawrence Clark’s drummer, to search out a bunch of new jazz.  Biking off, pre-dawn I had on the trumpeter Wayne Tucker’s album, “When I Was a Child.”  Listed as someone whom Ramirez had played he had a bunch of material there on Spotify.  The title track was the second one on and the guest vocalist J Nathaniel Reed sings a song that was easy to get lost in.  A young man, reflecting on a complicated relationship with his father, whom he no longer sees as flawless.  Someone he looks forward to seeing again, despite his regrets about compromises during his upbringing.  Music is something they could always connect on. 

I need something driving, certainly, at the gym.  But this morning ride can accommodate space, can allow for reflection. For the first two thirds of the ride there are no street lights up above I can only glimpse beyond the shadows of the curb.  Still, I know precisely what is there beyond them. 

A meeting down by the Olympic park this morning.  I’d had a false start on this one over the weekend, when I thought these visiting gents from Brazil had wanted to meet on a Saturday.  Setting out I assumed we’d take Jing Cheng Expressway down to the fifth ring road but rather he cut across town along the Qinghe River that divides Chanping and Haidian districts.  Now in broad daylight I don’t know what lies beyond the curbside.  This old city of mine is once again something to peer out into anew. 

At the Beiyuan North station, where I’ve suggested we meet, there is a big overpass and a mall or two.  I hadn’t known where to meet for food but, as suspected, there would be something around the station.  I suggest we head up into the mall to find a restaurant.  One shop keeper and then another directs me upwards.  “Whatdya looking for?”  “Some place nice, we can sit down.”  Then go up, the third floor.  We walk through a shoe department and past the ladies wear till we pop out near one and then another restaurant.  I feel compelled to tell my guests, for whom it is the first time in China, that years ago we would certainly have all been stared at, walking around in a mall like this.  Innocent, harmless gawking that doesn’t really happen much anymore.

Later after lunch they ask to have our photo taken together.  I ask the waiter, with whom I’ve struck up a nice rapport to take our picture, with my camera, even though another young waitress is already setting up a photo with a one of the guest’s camera.  He misunderstands and plops down next to me in the booth assuming I’d wanted him to join our photo.  Innocent, it doesn’t matter.  Please, sit right down.  Smile. 

Monday 11/19/18