“Spouting Volcano on the Horizon”
Monday was Martin Luther King Day. Here’s an essay he wrote in 1964, after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, for the Berlin Jazz Festival. What wonderful writing, capturing the role music has played in social change in a compact essay:“God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create—and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations.
Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph.
This is triumphant music.
Modern jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument.
It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls.
Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down.
And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith.
In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.”
I caught a flight to Guatemala City on Monday afternoon for work. There were several guys sitting near us who were with an organization called “Stoves for Guatemala.” Apparently rural Guatemalans often cook on unventilated wooden stoves in single room dwellings, leading to bad respiratory disease. This organization has built 600 clean burning and well ventilated stoves already.
https://helping-guatemala.com/
Here are some aerial pictures of the Guatemala City area during landing:
BP was excited to be allowed on the trip, and insisted on having his picture taken on arrival at the airport.
I stayed in an area called Cuidad Cayala – a planned city done in the Colonial architecture style. The GoWork office and restaurants were all a short walk for the hotel, which made things very easy. Cayala is very pretty and safe – with many high end shops and restaurants.
I met some work colleagues for an Italian dinner at Tre Fratelli on Monday night. We sat outside and it was very chilly for Guatemala (high 50s). I needed my puffer coat as the evening cooled off, with no humidity at all. The city is at 5,000 feet and so cools quite quickly this time of year.
Here’s a picture of a volcano spouting in the distance, taken from my hotel room balcony:
Tuesday breakfast was at Cafe Saul – a great spot that I found on my last visit. It’s so nice to be able to get a perfect macchiato with no fuss.
My first meeting of the day was a one on one with Jorge, and we decided to sit out on the patio of Cafe Barista and enjoy another coffee. Such a pleasant way to do business and get caught up before the rest of the day inside.
Lunch was again enjoyed al fresco – this time a Greek place called Arena. The pulpo (octopus) and falafel were both delicious, and the setting delightful.
After a long afternoon of team meetings, we enjoyed a seafood dinner at Atuna. The croquette appetizer was delicious and then I enjoyed a very impressive lobster thermidor.
Sunset behind the volcanoes after dinner was quite something:
Back in Pacifica, the girls were enjoying the sunny day and then afternoon tea – complete with some very fancy finger sandwiches.
Diana sent me this lovely video of Frankie showing me her penguin sweatshirt. She can be so adorable when she’s not being quite stubborn and opinionated:
Wednesday was another busy day of meeting various teams. That was followed by a steak dinner with the leadership team at Montanos. We had a private room with a TV that allowed us to share videos and photos of hobbies. Damon gave a short talk about his basement garden where he grows peppers and vegetables during the winter. Josue shared videos of him drumming with his band that won the Guatemalan Battle of the Bands contest. A fun evening.
With the new US COVID rules – test no more than 24 hours prior to flight departure, I had to take a test before dinner. Here I am working away while awaiting the test:
We met with our Project Management team on Thursday morning, enjoyed another delicious lunch at Arena, and then made our way to the airport for the flight home. I had an Ensalada Fatouch that was very fresh and yummy. Finn always has a chuckle about “Fatouch”. I don’t really remember why – think there was somebody he worked with that liked it.
I was fortunate again, with a smooth and on time flight. Customs at DFW was very quick and I just had to wait a short while for Diana to arrive from San Francisco.
It’s always pleasant to return to my home office, and I worked in it most of Friday morning. Then we picked up Finn from work and had lunch at the Mexican Cactus. Diana tried the ceviche with barramundi and it was really fresh and delicious.
Will supervised the loading of Finn’s car on to a transporter that should deliver it here on Tuesday. Will has put a lot of time and money into getting the car absolutely perfect for Finn to enjoy. I only have a limited number of days to wake up at 4:30am to deliver Finn to work, and I know the retiree is quite happy about that.
Jens and Glenda are coming over for dinner tonight. We’re looking forward to it as it has been months since we’ve caught up with them. I think McD is planning her excellent shrimp and scallops – yum!
“The Blue Hour” by Douglas Kennedy was my companion on the trip this week. What a well written and constructed book. I was hooked on the first page and wasn’t disappointed after that. Page one:
“First Light. And I didn’t know where I was anymore.
The sky outside: was it a curved rotunda of emerging blue? The world was still blurred at its edges. I tried to piece together my whereabouts, the exact geographic location within which I found myself. A sliver of emerging clarity. Or maybe just a few basic facts.
I was on a plane. A plane that had just flown all night across the Atlantic. A plane bound for a corner of North Africa. A country which, when viewed cartographically, looks like a skullcap abreast a continent. According to the flight progress monitor illuminating the back-of-the-seat screen facing me, we were still seventy-three minutes and 842 kilometers (I was flying into a metric world) from our destination. The journey hadn’t been my idea. Rather I’d allowed myself to be romanced into it by the man whose oversize frame (as in six foot four) was scrunched into the tiny seat next to mine. The middle seat in this horror movie of an aircraft.”
A good plot summary from Amazon:
“Robin knew Paul wasn’t perfect. But he said they were so lucky to have found each other, and she believed it was true. When he suggests a month in Morocco—where he once lived and worked, a place where the modern meets the medieval—Robin reluctantly agrees.
Once immersed into the swirling, white-hot exotica of a walled city on the North African Atlantic coast, Robin finds herself acclimatizing to its wonderful strangeness. Paul is everything she wants him to be—passionate, talented, knowledgeable. She is convinced that it is here that she will finally become pregnant.
But then Paul suddenly disappears, and Robin finds herself the prime suspect in the police inquiry. As her understanding of the truth starts to unravel, Robin lurches from the crumbling art deco of Casablanca to the daunting Sahara, caught in an increasingly terrifying spiral from which there is no easy escape.
For fans of thought-provoking page-turners such as The Talented Mr. Ripley, Douglas Kennedy’s The Blue Hour is a roller-coaster journey into a heart of darkness that asks the question: What would you do if your life depended on it?”
An example of the excellent descriptions:
“Simo insisted that I sit in the backseat, where I had both windows wide open to rid the car of his incessant cloud of smoke, and to provide some ventilation on a torpid night when the humidity and the actual mercury level made the air seem as glutinous as maple syrup.”
For a pleasant change, the ending of this story wasn’t rushed but unfolded at just the rate pace.
I really enjoyed the story, the writing style and the surprising twists of this book very much. I understand that Kennedy is much better known in the UK and France than in the US, and maybe those folks appreciate this kind of writing for the same reasons that I do.
Cafe Saul in Guatemala plays an eclectic mix of music, with some really unusual covers of popular songs. I had to use Shazam to identify who was playing this hit from David Bowie. A typically subtle arrangement from M. Ward:
Something from my Spotify Discovery Weekly list. The level of musicianship on a Bela Fleck album is always extraordinary:
A song from The National that I think I heard on a movie soundtrack, but can’t remember the details:
And lastly, a lovely song from the excellent Rodney Crowell:
Stay safe and kind!