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

Their Own Bilateral Relationships

New opportunity consummated this evening.  It would appear I’ll be heading to Brazil.  That’s a big one.  Friends of mine from Brazil have mentioned, in passing that it was the world’s fifth largest economy.  Sounded good to me.  I think I’ve repeated the statistic blithely, in my water-cooler conversations: “Well, of course there’s a rich dialogue between the world’s second largest economy and the world’s fifth.” 

Contemporary minds needn't wonder about visiting a library for research, to verify such things.  Five or six clicks suggest that while China is indeed the world’s second largest national economy Brazil, at least for now, after a poor year’s worth of performance, is the eighth largest national economy.  This consulting the unimpeachable “world economy” tab on Wiki.  England, France, India as well as Japan and Germany which I knew, are each listed as larger economies.  The other telling data point is that unlike The United States or China whose economies are “peaking” at present in 2018, the Brazilian economy was at its largest for GDP in 2011.   Perhaps it was the fifth largest in 2012. 

Doesn’t matter.  Two giants are learning about one another.  And even though U.S. China relations are in the doldrums, the rest of world have their own bilateral relationships to manage.  And it is through my work in China that I am now led back to the Americas.  Three decades or more of appreciation for the country’s music, a fleeting understanding of its literature and political progression, a somewhat richer understanding of its business climate but ultimately an entire continental if not civilizational challenge to consider. 

This year I had been preparing for a visit to Israel and to Egypt with the family.  I have focused a year’s worth of personal reading towards this geography.  I’ve read Jordanian literature and Palestinian literature in addition to Israeli and Egyptian.  And now, suddenly in three weeks I may be over, once again, in a completely different context for which I haven’t been able to prepare at all.  Dive in.   Dive in when you can, and consider yourself lucky to be alive and fluid.

Thursday 02/14/19

The Combinations Yield All

Unexpectedly Mafouz has begun to drag.  Perhaps it is just me.  I’ve been reading in smaller increments.  I think I need to make a bold commitment soon to breathe back in immediacy.  We have moved ahead ten years or so second book “The Palace of Desire” and the youngest, Kamal is in love.  He’s been in love for a while.  And while it is evocative, certainly of anyone's obsession during first adoration, the regular, unexpected epiphanies which the first book: “The Palace Walk” had so regularly yielded are more rare now and I find I don’t care.

And now we have Kamal jilted and brokenhearted and treated unjustly by his love for a transgression he maintains is illusory.  His blues are similarly rather prolonged.  Any real blues is too long.  No question.  But I haven’t enjoyed returning as much as I used to, now 750 pages in.  When I’m not with Kamal, I’m over with his sister Khadija, the scheming, complaining trouble maker.  Her house is in trouble.  Surprise.  Her mother in law hates her.  Again, I’m not particularly concerned.  Khadija’s jibing used to be fresh.  What’s happened to Mafouz?  What’s happened to me?

I’d written about Freddie Hubbard last week.  Seems every day since then I have just been going through his work, album by album.  No one album has the same line up of musicians.  On his debut album he’s joined by the brilliant, tragic tenor player Tina Brooks, and then Hank Mobley followed by Pepper Adams before he’s playing with Wayne Shorter.  What a tremendous progression.   McCoy Tyner to Cedar Walton and back and forth again and again on the keys.  What’s it like to have Elvin Jones vs. Philly Joe Jones on the drums?  The combinations yield all these majestic possibilities.

“The Artistry of Freddie Hubbard” was on the ride to the gym this morning.  Tommy Flanagan on keys, Curtis Fuller on the trombone and a real treat which I tried to listen with particular attention to, John Gilmore on the tenor.  He goes on to be the Sun Ra’s aide de camp.  Coltrane for one was a big fan.  “Happy Times” is more aspirational than confessional this morning but I allow myself a bit of sophisticated buoyancy before sun pushes itself up over the horizon.   “Summertime” now with an infectious, swaying head, turning under the denuded winter, willow strands as I turn north for the final block.

Wednesday 02/13/14