Tag: Science fiction

Van’s Cafe pt II

Last Sunday morning was my first time at the jam session here.

Today, my second. It is getting better, sweeter and with more substance.

Thanksgiving weekend with friends and music lovers. It’s game weekend in the US. Or shop til you drop.

Here jazz music permeates the air we breathe.

Unrehearsed of course.

But it flows. The energy, the passion and just a good passage of time together.

I feel jazz. It’s warm, sweet and penetrating.

It makes us human. Playful and painful at the same time. The headache and heartache.

Share it brother!

Hi five.

We take a rest to be real audience.

Forget the bills, the business of life.

Just celebrate it while living it.

Being In love.

Being confused.

And being here.

Join me. I probably be here next Sunday. My friend won’t be. He is doing his numbers now, but will fly back to San Francisco, where he plays in the SF Jazz band.

I am glad he is here this weekend. So I don’t have to be all the way back across the pond to hear him.

Of course Hung brought his amplifier, and guitar. Dat (blind) on the piano and the KC band on drum and base guitar.

They play well together. Jam session.

The audience too. Very selective. Very very much in love with every note, every expression of seeing open soul on display.

“Sometime when we touch, the honesty too much”.

I don’t feel alone here, even at an empty table. They are after all up there jamming.

Beer half-opened and I sip mine slowly, for fear that their number will end too soon.

The Heineken you can reorder, but friendship and the mutual love for music will never die.

I wish you can be here. Not the kind of canned “I wish you a Merry Christmas” you hear all the time.

But I truly wish you an experience as valuable and unique as this one.

Pop, Jazz, French mix.

Like the city itself. Old Saigon, always adapting and thriving on chaos.

I love this city, it’s people and its multiple expressions however unrehearsed and unprepared.

It’s our best and it’s best in my eyes.

 

Deer facing headlights

WSJ most read article is “Why people can’t make decision” (see my other blog, “buy-in behaviors”).

I also found another article that reinforces this period of indecision: companies are saving the money they borrowed at bank’s low rates, thus fail to spur the economy.

Why would people borrow money at low rates, then sit on them? Companies need leadership (i.e. doing the right thing as opposed to “doing the thing right”). They forgot a biblical story about stewardship.

The post- WW generation are now in leadership position. Ambivalence is the norm (don’t blame them, after Vietnam and Watergate).

Right now, both parties are blaming each other for the ailing and failing economy.

And we in turn blame ourselves.

Self-recrimination paralyzes us, resulting in indecision. In short, deer facing approaching headlights.

Charlie Rose series on how the brain works, shows the frontal part of the brain, when damaged, causes moral lapses.

Our economic system got injured and is now in recovery (not as desired, but to be expected).

Any movement helps.

As long as the deer starts moving, and wakes up from its trance.

The stats indicated that it was a 18-month long recession. But it feels like decades.

The last recession, coincided with the dot.com burst, gave rise to Web 2.0 (whose contributors had a lot of time in their hand for Wikipedia and YouTube).

This time,  it shouldn’t be an exception. Something good will come out.

If you saw the recent front page story of the San Francisco Chronicle, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines.

With help from emergency crew (near SF), she was cut loose, and immediately swam in circle to show gratitude and joy. Very moving story of giving and receiving.

We can learn a lesson from the animal kingdom to enhance our humanity. We should wake up sooner than a deer facing oncoming traffic! Go against our natural reflex to survive and thrive. Keep moving. Let not gravity and inertia win the day.