A Cab That Is Not Moving

It’s hot.  I’m in a suit.  Sitting in the back seat of a cab that is not moving.  Sweat collecting now on my brow, in my pits.  It’s 1:30PM.  The Jing-Cheng Highway would normally be a reasonable bet.  I’m en route to a must-do meeting.  It is clear I will be ridiculously late. 

It’s important to remind oneself, though it is rather difficult, that fretting, yelling, squirming, exhaling loudly, saying “fuck” repeatedly do absolutely nothing to solve the problem.  Up ahead I can see for over a kilometer on an incline. Just  拭目以待[1] Traffic sits all the way through the ochre haze.  We move a few feet.  We change a lane.  Someone cuts in front of us.  I’ve offered the driver a tip if he drives “maximum aggressive.”  We stop again

Someone calls with an offer I would have jumped at nine months ago.  It feels fitting and proper and dignified to say, “no thanks.”  Late, now, I’ve informed people that my situation is what it is.  You try to make it sound wretched, but not so wretched that people question your veracity.  “I’m not moving at all.”  Well, that’s not true.  You just moved forward twenty feet.  “It’s unbelievably bad.”  That’s true, but then again, it’s not hard to believe this soft of rank obstruction could happen here. 

Slowly at first, and then steadily more so, you can feel the pressure start to release.  Things are moving off to the left.  "Mad-maximum" crawls slowly over to the left.  More motion.  We’ve reached a steady clip of 10mph.  I begin to feel like a trout that has beaten his way upstream out a turgid, brackish pool into aerated water.  My gills flex as we rise to 20 mph.  I can feel the life returning to my sprit,  Even the car’s feeble air conditioned air is starting to circulate something like cool air. 

And the culprit . . . ?  It was not a fifteen-car accident as I imagined.  Rather, off to the right at the exit before the one I’ll take, is a concrete sedimentation of truck traffic on the off ramp.  There, no one is moving.  I’ve been through something vexing, but that looks much, much worse.  We sail past doing 30. 

Today’s meeting is off in Shangdi.  It is an odd, transitional part of town, like I suppose most of this town necessarily is.  North of the fifth ring road, about parallel to where I am on the east, Shangdi is on the west.  Near the universities but far enough north to be a major schlep.  This is where many of Beijing’s tech works, foreign and local, are located.  There are ramshackle houses, next to glistening towers.  Perhaps there is more compromise buildings than there usually are in Beijing.  More extant architecture from the initial reform build-out of the 1980s.  

I’m looking for the company logo on a tower.  This is where Beijing's 'Cloud Valley' is located, there off to the left.  This is one of infinite number of places I've visited, trying to replicate the atmosphere of Silicon Valley.  I've spotted my tower.  I will need to put this away.

Now it is much later in the night.  I’ve had the kind of meeting you want to have where people say, “Yes. That’s what we need.”  It was so good in fact that the room full of engineers all applauded our guest at the end of the presentation.  And atmospherics can be deceptive. 

Now I’m in the back of a cab that I had to fight like the devil to secure.  I wound up walking a kilometer or so and then opted for a cab queue at the classic 'yesterday' hotel, that is currently having another big make over “The Kun Lun.”  Riding along in the back, moving at least, I’ve a raging headache.  What ever brought that on?  I think I’ve a package of aspirin somewhere in this bag. It was likely stress, espresso and beer, in that order of importance. 

Not sure if you are familiar with the Menahan Street Band, who are playing in my ears now.    The album, “Make Road by Walking”, is gorgeous.  I ran into it this morning randomly, following links from our featured band yesterday, Le Super Borgou de Parakou from Benin.  I believe some of the musicians were in the neo Afro-Pop, New York, band Antibalas.  The sound is deeply influenced by African jazz, for sure, but the main feeling is a sort of Motown-drenched jazz groove that suggests walking around on an urban day that isn’t quite sunny.   Named after the street in Bushwick, Brooklyn they live on, it isn’t hard to hear the borough’s size and complexity in the sound that should have been written decades ago, but couldn’t have been.  Somehow it brings to mind Amy Winehouse backing band.  She’d have sung beautifully over some of these tracks.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menahan_Street_Band

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[1] shìmùyǐdài: lit. to wipe one's eyes and wait (idiom); to wait and see

I'm So Tired, I Don't Know What to Do

Moving along at a quick pace along the East Fourth Ring Road.   This is no small thing.  I purposefully ended another meeting I had early, so that I could get a cab and get out of Wanda complex before rush hour.  It’s just about to turn 5:00PM.  Twenty minutes later and this would be a mess.  The spring air is thick with particulate God-knows what.  Regardless the trees on the side of the road still look beautiful with their fresh, April leaves. 

I’m yawning here in the back of this cab.  All afternoon I’ve been dragging, 筋疲力尽[1].  I was pinching myself in the meeting two hours back.  My propensity to fall asleep is rather dramatic and I need to be very careful when a meeting calls for me to sit and look intently while another person or two, dialogue.  Very difficult not to drift off into your own head and feel the lull of Hypnos.  If the conversation is in another language that I do not speak, like Japanese, it is a very dangerous situation indeed.  So I do what people do.  I offer up something banal to say: “that’s very important!”  “Is that right?” “Indeed.”  And I start to literally bite my tongue and poke my finger with a pen.  And all seems good, perhaps a bit too good.  A train of thought in my mind then suddenly gains complete authorship rights and leads to a narcotic eddy and before I know I’ve relinquished control, and I awake with a start.  Ooops. 

I always think of the Ronald Reagan presidency.  I was a teen when he was in office and we all loathed him.  I think his age was one of things we’d focus on to critique him.  “Oh yes.  He’s so old.”  And I remember laughing at that time when I learned that he apparently used to take a nap during the day there in the White House.  Indeed all offices in China used to have people leaning over their desks, face on an open newspaper and catching some mid day sleep when you’d get a meeting with someone around 1:00PM.  And we’d all think that was funny too.  It doesn’t all seem so funny just now.  A mid day nap seems like an infinitely sensible thing to do.  Embrace the body’s call for rest and jump back refreshed, or swallow espresso for umph all day.  The latter seems particularly facile when it doesn’t even work. 

I was on about Burkina Faso yesterday and how I’d once headed south from Ouagadougou to Tamale in Ghana.  If I’d headed southeast instead I’d have entered Benin, the site of the ancient kingdom of Dahomey.  Benin is a country I’ve never visited, but it is home to some of West Africa’s most remarkable music. The Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou, about whom I’ve written before are, with the exception of Fela Ransome Kuti and the Africa 70’, in a class by themselves in terms of remarkable recordings over many years of time.  It is to my ears something that spans and even elevates the two distinct sounds on either side of Benin, Nigeria to the east and Ghana (and of course Togo) to the West.

Today at the gym my other Benin faves who actually once bested Orchestre Poly-Rythmo in a battle of the bands the Orchestre Super Borgou de Parakou assisted me in my early morning effort to cultivate sweat.  Just listen to the opening lines of “Ko Guere” (date’s only provided as 1970 – 1976) with accompanying guitar.  Deceptively simple, tight, punchy, utterly plausible despite the fact that the language is indecipherable. http://analogafrica.blogspot.com/2013/04/analog-africa-no11-le-super-borgou-de.html  Apparently they were actually influenced heavily by the Congolese giant Franco, though it's harder for me to hear as they are much more rough and punching to my ears.

For some reason I’d long had it in head that this gritty, guitar, bass, drum, organ combo was actually from Burkina.  The ethnomusicologically refined folks at Analog Africa who re-released the material with a fascinating, almost Maoist cover art, had their good efforts at documentation wasted on me, as I’d somehow overlooked the obvious geographic question.  They are in fact from the north of Benin, about one hundred miles from the Burkina border, in the city of Parakou. 

I was once at a charity event here in Beijing and was ever so excited to learn that the ambassador of Benin would be at our table.  Right on!  I shouldered over to the gentleman and, above the din of the awards music tried to explain my profound respect Benin in general and for the music of his country, from forty years ago in particular.  He smiled and asked me if I lived in Beijing.  “Yes.” I replied.  Undaunted, I redoubled my efforts and tried to reintroduce the topic mentioning one and then another group and my ideas about the distinct “Vodoun” sound within that remarkable neighborhood.  “Yes.” He replied.  Then, smiling he turned to speak with another guest to his left, in French. 

Crestfallen, I slinked back to my seat on the other side of the table.  It would have been a fine time to have fallen asleep.  My host explained that English wasn’t his strong suit.  Indeed.  I once had some French chops but they are buried under decades of Chinese accretions.  Then again, even with compétences suppérieur en Français I might have only learned that the Honorable Ambassador was in fact a fan of Bach, or Miley Cyrus.  Then again, perhaps I'd have gotten the surprise and high-five I was looking for. 

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[1] jīnpílìjìn:  body weary, strength exhausted (idiom); extremely tired / spent

Volta, Volta, Volta in My Room

Sunny, spring day in Beijing.  The dust has yet to assert itself fully after the previous day’s rain.  I have the window open.  Workers are building someone’s porch outside, across the way.   They are working hard and they are spitting hard.  For the first seven or so epic hahcks I roll with it.  Then, I find I’m thinking about the spitting rather than my work.  Another one.  And then, another one.  Suddenly I’m a teenager again.  I wait for the next expectorate lunge . . . here it comes, then, without showing my face, but at the top of my lungs I imitate the sound and drag it out for twenty five seconds or so, my voice trailing across the courtyard.  Silence.  Coincidence?  Cough man waits a bit and then, a few moments later hahcks again. I repeat my mating call response, with all my might like a bull frog whose life depends upon getting noticed.  Dead silence.  We have communicated.  Funny, like throwing wet toilet paper out a New York apartment window on pedestrians below, but not especially productive.  I reach for my noise reduction headset.  I have something else I want to listen to.

The people of the Sahel would have a thing or two to say about yellow dust, living as they do, on the edge of the Sahara.  I rode across Burkina Faso in 1992, the year before I first came to China.  I traveled in overland from Mali by bush taxi and made my way south from Ouagadougou to Tamale in Ghana.  I was on a rather low-budget and “dinner” seemed to regularly end up being “rice with fish sauce” from a cart.  Ahh, but the music . . . Every city, had unique music.  And I would always ask, to find cassettes for vinyl of music from 20 years earlier.  I still have the tapes somewhere, waiting to be digitized. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkina_Faso

One night I was in the city of Bobo-Dioulasso, and I was looking for live music.  I was directed to a hotel that would have been a bit pricey for me at that time.  In the lobby they had the obligatory “live drumming show” or some such thing.  It felt like watching dolphins in captivity at Sea World.  Certainly it was a performance with leopard skins and fire dancing, but there was nothing spirited let alone genuine about it and I walked home, in the dark, grumbling at having wasted my money. 

Then, off in the distance, I heard it.  A live beat from somewhere and the sound of distorted guitars.  Hmm.  I headed in that direction.  Traipsing around the unlit streets of West African cities by oneself after dark was something I’d already learned could be a bit of a gamble, but this was truly a Siren song, undeniably 改弦易辙[1]and I was going to follow it to its source.   Off to the left, up to the right, passed potholes the size of automobiles.  Then, there, up ahead, there was a clearing with a generator humming powering two streetlights, and two amps and there were a two hundred people surrounding the band.  Wild dolphins, swimming freely. 

The band consisted of two drummers as I recall, banging out a funky irresistible beat with the two warmly distorted guitars playing cyclical loops in the high registers over the top.  I’d love to say there was a thumping bass player and a syncopated brass section, but I think that was about it.  But nothing else was needed to get the line of thirty some odd women dancing in a circle in the center, backwards with their generous backsides leading the way, in groovy lockstep, back, turn, spin, clap.

If you put on music from Mali in the 70s, like the Bamako Rail Band, there is a distinct, broad savannah view sound with lots of guitars and polyrhythmic flourishes minimized. Once you hear the music of Ghana with the celestial harmonies and apogee-like refinement of Ashanti drumming it can only be from one country.  Burkina lies between them and frankly I would have been hard pressed to blind-test identify the sound.

At that time Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s Ivory Coast was by far and away the most developed, modern country in the region.  And when you spoke to Invoirians about their music they would often say that the best performers were all the Burkinabe’ from the north.  I had more than a few Ivoirian cab drivers in NYC corroborate this.  I had a few cassettes I’d gotten there, during the trip, but nothing like what I knew must be out there, given what was everywhere surrounding the arid plains of Upper Volta. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_Houphou%C3%ABt-Boigny

And today, when I called it quits on dueling throat calls, I reached for some music of Burkina that I’d heard yesterday.  This is the grand project compiled by the ethnomusicologists over at Analog Africa.  This their 10^th release, “Bambara Mystic Soul (The Raw Sound of Burkina Faso 1974-1979).”  Raw indeed.  Dig the yell at the beginning of the tune “Tink Tank” by Afro Soul System.  Dig the infectious positivity on “Rog Mik Africa” by Orchestre CVD.  My personal favorites are the irresistible “Dambakale” by Compaore Issouf and his lilting female back up singers, and the pièce de résistance English number “Love, Music, Dance” in which one Mamo Lagbema invites the lass to come up to his room, listen to great music and make love.   “Love, love, love in my room yeah.  Music, music, music, in my room yeah!”  Ripe, it was, for a Jackson Five cover.

To my earlier crossroads suggestion there are beautiful hints of the surrounding scenes in all this music and yet something core and notably upbeat about the Burkina sound.  I travel all the time for business but West Africa never winds up being on the agenda.  I sure do wish I could grab some rice with fish sauce to-go, and head back out to the that block party in Bobo, which has certainly packed up and been replaced by now with something very different.  

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[1] gǎixiányìzhé：change of string, move out of rut (idiom); dramatic change of direction / to dance to a different tune

Curious Du Halde

Following the trail of bass players from Wilbur Ware, to Sam Jones and on today to Mr. Buster Williams, who was born in Camden New Jersey two days before my own birthday, in 1942.  I’ve got on a tune that is just about as gentle as I can take, “Betcha By Golly Wow” from his 1980 release “Dreams Come True.”  He’s stroking with a bow and it sounds beautiful.  The following tune, is finger picked, a straight up driving version of “Ain’t Misbehavin’” that could be useful as I punch my way through this Monday.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buster_Williams

One project for this blog is to have a look at some of the pieces I have hanging on my wall and try to reckon with them.  You put things up, they stay there and you walk past them all the time.  Guests come and very rarely someone asks and you say “ah yes, this is . . . “ whatever it is, if you can properly recall.  To-date I think I’ve managed to discuss two pieces: a copy I have from the Palace Museum in Taipei of Zhao Mengfu’s "Autumn Colors at Qiao and Hua Mountains", which is set in Shandong.  The other that I recall is the little poster of the Greek Isle of Hydra I have up done by Periklis Byzantios.

When you walk in our front door there is an eighteenth century European map of the province of Shandong.  This is the turf that my wife hails from and with ninety-eight million people and a history as old as Egypt, there is plenty to keep one occupied, should it fall into your gaze.  I bought the map I have in Hong Kong eight years or so, ago.  John Wattis and his wife Vicky have a wonderful store, right off the escalator there on Hollywood Road in Hong Kong.  I’ve bought a few things from them over the years.  I just went over and looked at it and John had written on the back “Du Halde 1735.” http://www.wattis.com.hk/gallery/maps/20/

If you look the gentleman up, as I just did, you find that Jean-Baptiste Du Halde, was a French Jesuit who was born in Paris on 1 February 1674 and died 18 August 1743.  Though he never traveled to China, he wrote, what was at the time the definitive European look at the empire:  “The General History of China Containing a Geographical, Historical, Chronological, Political and Physical Description of the Empire of China, Chinese-Tartary, Corea, and Thibet; Including an Exact and Particular Account of Their Customs, Manners, Ceremonies, Religion, Arts, and Sciences : The Whole Adorn'd with Curious Maps, and Variety of Copper-Plates.”   Pithy title.  Mine, was one of the 42 maps, within.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Du_Halde

Now I don’t suspect that the piece I have hanging on my wall was one that Du Halde himself ever physically drafted with his own hands.  But I do believe it was a print from that time.  The map itself is gorgeous and though the Romanizations are a different from those commonly used today, “Province De Chan-Tong” it is still easy enough to place some timeless Chinese names of villages and towns.  The city of note, closest to my wife’s home town, Binzhou, stands out in bold with a small red city symbol besides it as “Pin-tcheou.”  A good reminder that the proper pronunciation of the city I live in is neither Bei Jing, or is it Pei King but actually something in between them both.   

The book itself became standard in the libraries across Europe and sparked interest in China at time of the chinoiserie of that period, when Europe was benignly fascinated by a China it didn’t understand and still could not easily access.  Within a hundred years, the fascination would turn to disdain and opportunism.  Europe’s blessing and curse was it’s underlying understanding of itself as peripheral for so much of its history, before it could imagine itself the center.  Peripheral to Rome, and Jerusalem, and Constantinople.  Curiosity and a conviction to convert lead Du Halde to devote his work to a far away place that he’d never have the chance to visit.  A 好奇上衣[1] mind of the Enlightenment. Who in China, at that time, cared to map anything beyond the world it knew and might still safely assume, was the center?

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[1] hàoqíshàngyì:  liking what odd, interested in what is different (idiom); curious about the exotic / inquisitive

Quintet of the Congo

Happy Easter.  Three ladies getting ready for a brunch.  The young one has been trying on different newly bought dresses for the last two hours.  The older one is slowly rising from bed.  The mother hen is telling them to take certain things off and put other things on, and isn’t anywhere near ready herself.  The Internet is down which has me ready too throw my computer at the wall, but otherwise, I’m showered and shaved and ready to depart.

Ray Lema strongly exceeded expectations.   The space we saw him in, this “Post Mountain Art Space” strongly exceeded expectations. I’ll go back there for sure. http://site.douban.com/192672/  After writing about jazz and African music day after day.  After photographing people playing live jazz from the street in San Francisco, but not getting inside, it was splendid to finally enter a hall, take some seats, watch the lights go down and be blown away.  Been way too long.  I wasn’t sure about the artist or the space in yesterday’s entry.  Concerns were completely unfounded.  See the man if he comes to your town.

His sparse approach on the keys which I’d had a bit of work embracing on some of the earlier albums I’d sampled, took on an Ellingtonian grace sitting there with his cherubic smile and his faint, but utterly convincing voice.  Here’s a man, which the Post Mountain brochure suggested was born on a train, there in the Congo.  And I thought of Zaire cum Democratic Republic of the Congo and of what it must have been like to come up in Mobutu Sese Seko’s newly independent kleptocracy of Afro Centrism.  I thought about ‘Rumble’s in the Jungle’ and of the tunes of Franco and Tabu Rey, from that flowering period that changed pop music across the continent.  And I nodded and yelled out appropriately to the stage as he finished the first and then the second number.   Within no time, it was on.

Ray Lema in his youth, apparently played with Tabu Rey, who has been profiled on DB before, but this show was certainly no Zaireoire; the style with multiple high-end jangly guitars that swept out from central Africa in the 70’s.  This quintet hadn’t even one guitar.  On the on-line video of the quintet, there is a bald, African bass player, one Etienne Mbappe, who thumped away confidently.  But last night the electric bass was a hirsute gent whose stringy hair apparently reminded my daughters of me when I grow my hair out.  Lovely.  Can’t find his name.  Any rate, the man could play.  The drummer, Nicolas Viccaro, aggressive, maybe a bit too aggressive for the mix that night, was certainly capable and infectious in his own way.  The horns Irving Acao on sax and Sylvain Gontard on trumpet were well matched with a sense of interaction and play that drew just about everyone in.  Mssr. Gontard got off one solo in particular that had me yelling things aloud like a moron.

And after, yet another number perhaps it was “Anikulapo” that can only have been dedicated to Fela, referencing the giant’s middle name that way and vamping off “Gentleman”’s lyrics that had me moving and tracing the solo of just about each and every man on stage, the leader, Mr. Ray Lema addressed the audience in a bit of Chinese and then in English.   Then, finally, respectfully, because the event had been hosted by the French embassy, he switched over to French and sounded somehow even more centered, majestic and convincing.  I was so happy to be there with my girls, who rarely get to see live music, brilliantly delivered.  It was a perfect birthday moment.  As I said to everyone and no one on the way out, the night before Easter . . . “this is my cathedral.”  For all the times I write about gents’ who’ve passed, or spun out early, or cited obituary’s how wonderful to have seen this gentleman, and exposed my family to this high art form of the African Diaspora. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zy14h3MAd7c

And no one had eaten.  So at 10:00PM or so when we left we began to crawl around the area near by in the netherland of to-be-destroyed buildings that remain in that crosshairs between the second and third ring road where the Dongzhimen overpass, has been cut through.  Oh, great, Din Tai Fung will hit the spot and we plough in and are told that the chef has packed it in for the night.  Back on the crawl and up a block ahead there are four our five spots that still seem to be serving.  “What kind of food do you guys serve here?” “Shanxi food.”  OK.  Cool.  Fill up the table with Shanxi food that doesn’t cost much and tastes real good and unpack this show we’ve just seen before people start to pass out, tired.  A birthday taken to its logical end.

And heading in today to this Easter brunch, we pass my favorite twin trees in all of Beijing.  Off to the right are the twin jacaranda trees of the San Yuan Qiao cloverleaf.  And today they are waxing, in full bloom, purple bouquets outstretched, from top to bottom, indeed trumpeting 姹紫嫣红[1] This is the time, which this pair of trees waits for every year.  Most of the winter they are barren.  During the summer they are shrouded in leaves that suck in day light but in no way distinguish the two trunks. But for this week in April, you cannot ask for more than the two hundred and fifty some odd heliotrope offerings that this tree make to our city.  If you visit our town in the spring and come in from the airport by car, you can’t miss them.

I am biased because it is the anniversary of my birth.  But April really is “the cruelest month.”  What else could ever be so enviable and temporal?

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[1] chàzǐyānhóng: fig. beautiful purples and brilliant reds (idiom); lit. beautiful flowers

The Night I Was Born

 I seem to have turned 48.  I was just typing in the date into this Word document.  That date that you have to put into forms of one sort or another all year long, assumes a magical quality, when the globe-spin settles on your day itself.  I always used to love to see the physical newspaper with your date up there on the top.  It’s already one in the morning back home.  I went to the online site.  My date’s up there.  It glistens for me.

As with every day, I need to find a chengyu for the entry.  I looked for one that had the word “birthday” in it.  Why am I not surprised to find that there was only one and that it was a western pun that had nothing to do with the concept of a birthday.  If there is one “holiday” concept that struggles to span the divide from my wife’s worldview to my own, it is “birthday.”  We won’t go into it.  Let’s just say it’s “different.”  But, she like me was born 一丝不挂[1], and essential commonalities run deeper even than civilization.

I figured I’d look to see if there’d be any live music in town for this evening.  Usually there is one reason or another why we never get it together to go take in music as a family.  Today I get to insist.  I looked on line and there was a show that caught my eye.  The Ray Lema Quintet is in town.  I wasn’t familiar with the Congolese pianist, so I dug in. 

Rdio had about five of his albums from about ten to fifteen years back.  They’re good, if a bit wispy somehow to my ears.  I found a track or two from his latest album on youtube, that’s a fuller afro-bop swing and it settled it for me to call the venue and get us some seats for tonight. 

I looked up the spot.  It’s a reasonably convenient location.  Let me dial these guys up. “Hi, can book four seats for the Ray Lema show tonight?” I ask in Chinese.  The guy on the other line effectively responds in a thick, urban patois of non-service “Huh?  Oh.  You want what? Seats for tonight.  Um sure.”  “Well. Yes.  Can you put four down for tonight under Mr. Fang?” “Four.  OK.  You want to see the show?”  I’m wondering if I’ve got the wrong number.  The dude’s accent coupled with his attitude is just about indecipherable.  “Yeah, so I think you have some seats for five-hundred yuan each.  What are those like?  Are they near the place?”   I can’t recall the proper term for “stage.”  “Alright let me get this down . . . Mr. Fang?  Alright.  And so you want a zhengfeng fengzheng?”  He didn’t say that but with his dees-doos-dems diction I’m lost and I’m not sure I want to commit to buying anything with Snappy the helpful box office manager. 

So I cop out.  Never cop out.  But I copped out.  I called for the wife.  She’s busy.  Of  course.  I forcefully call for the wife, pleading that I need help on this one.  She’s busy.  “So, like, do you want five of the zhengfeng fengzheng or is your deal for like fuwuzhengfengli?”   “Um just a minute.”  “Honey can you hop on with this guy.  I’m trying to get four of the 500 yuan seats for this thing tonight.  Can’t you just . . . ?  “Who is this person?  Where is this place?”  “Reasonable, but irrelevant my love.  Just get four tickets for this evening please.  OK?”  Handing her the phone.  “Wei?  Wei?  Wei! WEI!  WEI!”  This isn’t going well.  

“Wei” means is the effective equivalent of “hello” when you get on the phone.  “Do you know what he did?”  “No honey, what did he do.”  “He asked me “why wei?”  That is so rude.  What is this place.”  “It’s like an art collective.  It seems fine.  Can’t you just call them back and nail it honey?” “I need to look at this place before I take my girls there.”  Oh dear.  “Fine, I’ll do it myself.”  I call the number back three times, no one answers.  OK.  Verified.  The guy’s inarticulate and a dick.  I fantasize calling the number seventeen times until someone answers the phone and then barking something absolutely inappropriate about their mother into the line, but reason this is a dumb way to spend my good-vibe morning on my birthday. Breathe. 

My birthday New York Times carries a gut-wrenching story over across the brine in South Korea.  A ferry on its way to Cheju Island, where I’ve imagined traveling to with my kids many times,  took a hard turn and capsized.  Now 273, mostly all students from one school, are missing and presumed dead.  The vice principal who survived the accident was found hanging from a tree, presumably a suicide.  The captain and first mate who were rescued are under arrest. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/19/world/asia/south-korean-ferry-accident.html?hp

In this modern era we can now share in the some of the final minutes of such a tragedy.  The students, suited up in life preservers were all texting their parents from aboard the ship and the Times had these messages translated for consideration.  The kids were all still in the hold.  Some parents counsel the kids to follow instructions, which is probably the same advice I would have given and makes sense until you realize the people who should have been organizing the evacuation were too busy being rescued. One father is telling his daughter to head up to the top of the ship so the rescuers can find her.  She says she can’t because there are too many people and the ship has already listed over.  

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/world/asia/messages-from-students-on-south-korean-ferry.html

I shared these with my kids.  They are, as regular readers know, keen fans of all things South Korean and, as expected the texting exchanges hit them as well.  “Why did they just go up top?”  Why can’t you just hold your breath and swim to the top?”  “That girl should have listened to her father.”  “What does this line mean ‘has not been heard from since’ . . . ?"

I suggested, more than once, that my wife read the articles the kids had read as well.  “When I have time.”  She is still smarting from the encounter with the ‘please-don’t-come-to-our-venue’ ticket man.  Ah well.  It’s the birthday blues that happen every year.  “No bad vibes on my day.”  Impossible.  My younger daughter made me a salad.  That was sweet of her.  The carrot slices where the size of hockey pucks, but it was lovely.  I’ll let you know if we get our selves on to actually see Mr. Lema. If I do, I’ll have a musician to write about for Easter Sunday. 

Today, I took my advice from yesterday and dug into both Wilbur Ware, the bass player whom I wrote about and the other guy, whose solo it might have been but probably wasn’t on the Blue Mitchell number “Kinda Vague”, Sam Jones.  The two discs of Mr. Jones that Rdio has available are beautiful.  There is one from 1977 that is called “Something in Common” that comes on strong and an earlier album packed with tunes from that unbeatable hard bop year of 1960 “Soul Society” on Riverside.  Blue Mitchell himself is soloing as we speak on a track called “Off Color.”  And where as Mr. Ware’s playing was almost pared down pugilistic, this feels more like some swift moving figure skating.  

My older one baked me a cake.  The fact that the insides were still in batter form didn’t stop us from consuming most of it.  I’ve the window open in this writing room open.  The sun is beginning to shine.  (of course.) Across in the next yard, workmen are building something and spitting a lot.  I think I’m ready to try the dude at the jazz venue again to to get my seats.   Enjoy my day, wherever you are. 
 

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[1] yīsībùguà:  not wearing one thread (idiom); absolutely naked / without a stitch of clothing / in one's birthday suit

Kinda Vague

I’m going to be late to a meeting.  There were no cabs to be had.  Usually you just dial up the front gate and they come within minutes.  Today I fired off an email, ate a banana and was still there waiting.  This means you need to schlep out to the high street and slug it out yourself.  The assumption is that if there isn’t a cab sitting for you there, the guard out front is only ever fighting so hard on your behalf.  Sure, he’ll raise his hand if a cab flies by, but he isn’t going to go all out. 

I show up, clarify that I’m the guy he was otherwise supposed to be getting a cab for and I plod out into the middle of the road.  Now I’m relevant for traffic either way.  I’ve been up late and my mind is on a lag.  I turn and see a bus with his signal on running fast, turning into what would be the on coming traffic lane.  I turn to regard what it is he’s turning towards.  Indeed, there is on coming traffic he would plow into.  Turning back I realize he’s banked and is now heading straight for me in the meridian.  I ponder leaping for a second, but he straightens just in time and continues on past me with a foot or so to spare.

I'm not sure why, but once you're physically out here something usually shows up pretty quick.  Sure enough, there is someone getting off at our compound within a minute or two.  I go to stand beside as she pays and collects her receipt.  We should be good.  He hasn’t waved me off yet.  But you never know.  My steed, which has arrived in just the nick of time could snarl at me, wave his hand and speed off.  Quickly I jump in and establish my credentials, thick with swallowed r’s and directional slang and a “look-I-fucking-do-this-every-day-of-my-life” vibe.  He buys it.  We’re off.

It’s hot today.  We’re not exactly 汗流浃背[1], but we’re getting there. I have a blazer on and it is way too much coverage.   I wish I was wearing a tee shirt.  This may be the first day in Beijing where I’m actually sweating this year.  We miss it all winter and then it comes too soon, and it's a nuisance.  The air is thick.  Surprise!  It looks like it might rain at some point today, which would help the air and the dirty ground, but would create a new challenge for me when I need to find the return cab ride home. 

This is an interesting area I’m driving through now.  It’s old-suburban-factory,-warehouse Beijing, out eastward from the 798 Art compound.  This is what half the city looked like fifteen years ago.  It’s what damn near the whole city looked like between the third and fourth ring road fifteen years ago. What’s the time stamp on these linoleum show rooms before they are finally flattened for luxury condos?   Pulling up now to where the meeting must be.  Bring on the rain, but wait till I have my net cab, please.  Today is Good Friday, and so I may as well paraphrase St. Augustine.  “Give me the will to resist temptation Lord.  But please, not yet.”

Meeting done.  Not a drop of rain.  The company called this fella for me and I didn't’ have to wait more then three minutes.  This must be the “Uber” effect.  No one wants to put up with merely finding a cab now.  (Unless you’re a suburban fathead like me.) Just dial for one, or a third party service.  The gent I was doing meetings with in Shenzhen, the day before last did the same thing.  Somehow I don’t think to do this out at my house, until the one out of tenth time I’m stuck with no cab to grab and no one to dial.  Now a days you can’t toot around in a Beijing cab without listening to the incessant, garbled broadcast of this young lady or that gravely man broadcasting to the entire city where it is they are and where they wan to go.  More than ever headphones are required for cross-town sanity. For now I am stuck in good old-fashioned cross-town traffic.  It’s only 2:00PM and the ride that would take ten minutes at 2:00AM grinds along for forty-five plus minutes. 

Oh, cute, in the car next to me they are cranking a bad song that I know: The “I'm a Singer” T.V. show,  “American Idol” aspirant young Taiwanese lady’s flat version of the Beyonce song “If I Were a Boy.”  This earnest lass whose face I have reluctantly seen shot from fifty or more angles, pensive, smiling, and whose name escapes me is belting it out for all the traffic jam to hear.  For my daughters, for that young lady driver in this time and place, she’s the shit. Agreed, sans italics.

Now look here.  I don’t usually talk about a performer twice if I can help it. No one deserves mention twice before someone gets an initial exposure.  That just isn’t fair.  I have spoken about Blue Mitchell before.  The Miami trumpet player has already had his day on the Brine.  But I am sitting in my downtown office, on- line at the Bookworm sipping a glass of High West Whiskey “American Rye” and it is now the fourth time that I have hit return to hear this perfectly entitled tune “Kinda Vague.”  Couldn’t have said it better myself. 

Now mind you Wynton Kelly sounds commanding and Blue himself comes in to the sparse mix like King Lear around minute six, but the one who has me now thinking seriously about and indeed acting on the initiation of the sixth listening of the tune, is the bass palyer whom I believe is Wilbur Ware.  (Sam Jones also plays bass on some cuts.)  But the choppy angular infectiousness matches with the Chicago born Wilbur’s reputation for percussive bass playing.  It’s ending now for he sixth time.  He keeps repeating the seven-note cycle, as if it answered everything over and over again on this tune that Wynton Kelly and Blue Mitchell jointly wrote in 1960.  I’ve found at least one of Wilbur’s albums there on Rdio.  I’ll be on to it next. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilbur_Ware

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[1] hànliújiābèi:  to sweat profusely (idiom) / drenched in sweat