barely a block away from the hotel, his cell phone rang and he told me it must be his 14 y.o. niece. “the crudest kid i know,” he said with obvious pride. “she sends me rude jokes everyday.”

then with me watching the road nervously, he began reading off the tiny screen.

“what’s a clit?” “a special tickle spot on a woman”

“what’s a cunt?” “the rest of her,” he chortled.

“a older woman seduced a young man and convinced him to do 69 on the sofa. after a while, she told him to get up and move to the bed where they can be more comfortable. the lad started putting on his pants. confused, the woman asked what’s going on. as he zipped up his pants he said, “i ain’t doing 68 more times of that.””

har, har, har…

then, as if reading my mind, ian told me his niece’s dad was killed in a motorcycle accident a year ago.

“i can’t remember how many times he divorced over that bike. he spent all his time and money on it...but it was a really beautiful machine.”

“she’s good kid,” he continued, “i’m going to retire in january and then my lady and i will spend more time with her.”

“i’ve only had two jobs my entire life, the royal navy and driving, and this will be the third,” he said looking at me. “it’s important to love what you do.”

out of a total population of about a million people, only 20% are actual qataris. like other gulf countries, a majority of the workforce are expats from the middle east, north africa, and asia. the stewardesses on my qatar airways flights, for instance, were almost all indonesian.

regardless, the entire peninsula seems to be in the grip of olympicsmania. not the games this summer in beijing, but the 2016 games that qatar had bid on. it’s easy to be cynical about the way sports has now been integrated into public life: giant 2016 bid posters hang from billboards and skyscrapers, gala dinner held on the basketball courts of the humongous aspire stadium, and drivers eagerly chatting me up about archery and judo, sports popular there. who knew?

but the excitement, however loud and extravagant, seemed too genuine and sincere to be dismissed as mere propaganda. there’s a palpable sense of pride that went beyond nationalism. it’s as if by making this bid to host an competitive event steep in symbolisms of peace and friendship, qatar is announcing the emergence of a new arab culture, one that aims to redefine a historical dynamic stretching from the wars of darius and xerxes to the fuck ups of dubya.

so as i look at django’s little red face in my arms (ione calls him mr. squeaky), i grin from ear to ear.

a perky tune or two...

a shot of the surreal...

...a twist of sublime

and the bassline.

exactly how i remembered it.

the hubris and the profound ignorance that drove his florida-centric strategy are symptomatic of a delusional, pathological view of the world that fortunately for america, and the world, became roadkill on i-4 last night.

the entire norman manley international airport felt low-wattage, as if it's in a brownout. outside, people and vehicles loitered on the edge of darkness, silhouetted by passing headlights. the ride to the hotel through kingston shanties was equally a shadowy blur, punctuated by occasional street lamps where locals hung out to check out passing traffic.

but music was everywhere. my driver had a station on that had ike and tina’s “merry Christmas, baby” sandwiched between commercials and news about last night’s shootings. at one street corner, i spotted several old men in tatty tank tops and shorts drinking and laughing as junior murvin’s classic “police and thieves” pumped out of huge bass cabinet that doubled as a dominos table. and even before i walked into the hotel lobby, i heard the strain of james brown’s “santa claus, go straight to the ghetto.”

a holiday party was just getting started. a well-dressed, family-type crowd gathered around a large plastic tree with sprayed-on snow. the mc told corny jokes about xmas in the caribbean that were mostly drowned out by the rumble of clipped dancehall beats from a concert in the park across the street. it took me a while to fall asleep that night with all the racket.

over a breakfast of salt fish, papaya and fried dumplings (basically fried dough) next morning, i met my host, a big man quick to laugh who spoke leisurely with a slight british accent.

“yes, crime is bad here, but not any worse than new orleans where i did my internship,” he said somewhat defensively. “plus i have a nice house at the foot of the blue mountain and a nice car to drive.”

i wasn’t sure if who he was trying to convince. i’ve made up my mind the night before when the meeting planners told me i shouldn’t go anywhere on foot, not even during the day.

“yeah, he gonna kick yo ass back to china,” mick chimed in, both rows of his yellow, gappy teeth showing.

“shut the fuck up, bo!” i shot back. mick got no props in the office, especially after he corn-rolled his hair.

“where’s al?” i asked jay, ignoring whatever mick mumbled as a comeback. “dunno,” he said, “come back tonight, he’ll be here after 9.”

i don’t know why kenny dope wanted to kick my ass. after a couple of years immersed in the nyc house music scene, i’ve stopped asking why. the mostly puerto rican community often felt like one big dysfunctional family, complete with near cliché personal politics and psycho-drama. at any given time, you can count on being dissed or dissing someone.

i swung by again a bit after 9 and only the lights in al’s office were on. he must have heard me come in and shuffled out, tucking his shirt into his pants, followed in minutes by a couple of barely-dressed ladies.

they pointed at me but al waved them off, “nah, let him get his own pussy.”

“yo, you heard about this motherfucka,” al turned to me, “some crazy niggah downstairs who had the fucking nerve to tell my wife to shut up?”

“motherfucka needed to learn some manners, talking shit to a pregnant woman like that,” he added, clearly still feeling it. “man, you should’ve seen it, there was fucking blood everywhere. i loved it!”

without missing a beat, he grinned, “yo, so i heard kenny wanna kick yo ass.”

“it’s complicated,” his grin widened like he’s reading my mind, “but i’ll take care of it.”

that was during the time of “water color” and “new chautauqua.” even now, when i hear those albums, i get flashbacks of the pathetic sessions at various berkeley coffee shops where i engaged in hours of mental masturbation – pretentious debates on foucault (psychiatry) and derrida (same, of course) – just to be close enough to inhale her smoky exhale.

humiliation aside, it was interesting to trace the evolution of metheny’s sound from the folky “bright size life,” that revealed his lee’s summit, mo., roots to the scandinavian cool of “water colors” and the near-ambient “new chauauqua.” but the only nice thing i had to say about “american garage” was the dreamy cover featuring airstream trailers. i understood what he was going for – a jazz-rock fusion with a mid-west twist – but it just didn’t work, at least not with manfred eicher’s chilly production.

rightly or not, i held those albums responsible for the rise of what i called the cali hot-tub music, best exemplified by will ackerman’s windham hill releases of the early ‘80s. perpetrated by such navel-gazing limp noodles as george winston and ackerman himself, the basic problem was that unlike metheny, who at times came across as experimental or at least adventurous, ackerman et. al. were milquetoast. not everything on windham hill was shit, but the bad shit was so bad that they tainted all the rest, including my regard for metheny.

although later albums like “80/81” or even the overtly pop-tinged “offramp” (check the james taylor-inspired “james,” for example) redeemed him somewhat for me, it was his scathing critique of fusion keyboardist jeff lorber's former sidekick kenny g that really made me forgive him for past transgressions. when i first read the post on metheny’s web site, i thought it was the kind of straight talk we needed in music criticism: sincere, factual, and above all, infused with passion and intelligence about music and musicians.

for many years now, i haven’t really thought much about metheny, mostly because i’ve been immersed in hip-hop and dance music. at the airport the other day, there was the usual annoying hum of lite-jazz muzak in the background. it took me a minute to realize that the narcotic melody was carried by the timber of synthetic harmonica popularized by metheny, most notably on his 1981 minor hit, “are you going with me?”

i heard he published a theoretical physics paper in science or nature while still an undergrad. i hear he’s an original but undisciplined thinker and was all thumbs in the lab. at one of the company’s yearly “blue sky” retreats, where researchers would brainstorm new ideas, his presentation prompted the ceo to wonder out loud, “what the fuck was that?” kary later won the nobel prize for that idea.

i also heard he enjoyed the company of ladies and was, um, passionately invested in his relationships. sure, there were a few rough scraps with real and imagined romantic rivals, but they paled next to rumors of him bringing a gun to work during a particularly intense bout of jealousy.

but the story i enjoyed the most was one shared by one of his exs. “a 10,000 day old woman is biologically perfect,” i was told he said, “just like a ripe avocado.”

i know that reeks of cynicism, and i’m probably being less than fair to some of the wives; but because i know just enough to be annoying about both music and science, i can’t help but to take things a little personally when people bullshit me about either.

research by daniel levitin and others have shown that our ability to enjoy music is intimately linked with our social brain. in one study on williams syndrome, a genetic disorder where intellectual disability is typically accompanied by excessively social personality, levitin found that affected children seem to enjoy music more than their normally developing counterparts.

"compared to all other groups [e.g. kids with autism or down syndrome] including the controls [i.e. normally developing children],” he noted, “the ws individuals displayed greater emotional responses to music, manifested interest in music at an earlier age, and spent more hours per week listening to music. in addition, the effects of music listening (whether positive or negative) tended to last longer in the ws group.”

kids with williams syndrome have extraordinary musical aptitude in spite of their intellectual disability suggests intelligence, at least the way we currently define it, has little to do with their love of music, and in turns their humanity. this comparison is especially striking with kids with autism because they suffer from social-communication deficits, which also seem to rob them of some of the pleasure associated with music. as a researcher once told me, “understanding autism is like deciphering the rosetta stone of human behavior.”

i was in doha a few months ago visiting a developmental disability research center. at one point of the tour, we joined a bunch of kids in their music class. some were clearly autistic, but even those who were not seemed dull and detached.

the instructor was a trim, earnest-looking man with a balding head just shiny enough to be distracting. he took out an oud and started playing a serpentine arabic melody. to my surprise, the kids stopped what they were doing, gathered around him and, one by one, started swaying to the music.

which suited us fine. beyond tired after 4 intense days running a conference for over 1,000 people, we welcomed the chance to keep to ourselves. monica, carlos’s wife, ordered a bunch of appetizers for us. she pointed to me and told the waiter to hurry before i starved to death.

the duck tacos, looking like over-sized tootsie rolls, were deep fried and topped with a sweet and tart tamarind sauce. we polished off two orders while discussing why dana wouldn’t eat duck.

“cute,” she said, “can’t eat anything cute.”

“what if i tell you it was really ugly? haven’t you heard of ugly duckling?”

the melted brie with blueberry soup verged on the obscene. creamy warm cheese forms 4 gooey spiral jetties in a violet bath that was more sauce than soup, with just a hint of sweetness.

between bluish gobs of brie, susanna had us in tears with her ocd-like talent for annoying the jesus out of restaurant waiters by interrogating them on the making of each dish down to the last numbing sliver of detail.

“yes but monica, you know,” carlos leaned over and volunteered with a grin, “she’s never like normal people in restaurants.”

the crispy crab tostadas crumbled with each bite into moist florets of briny crab with tender crunchy celery and a hint of lime. monica, who's been busy cracking jokes and hasn’t eaten anything except dinner rolls, started to dig out their doughy insides onto a small but growing pile on the table.

“give her this much to drink,” he gestured, barely separating his finger from his thumb, “and she’s drunk.”

“first she laughs and laughs, then she wants to fight you, and then she feels bad and cries for her mommy, and then she falls asleep,”

he paused and added, “all in 5 minutes.”

pleased with my convulsive laughter, carlos told the story again to the other end of the table in spanish while monica handed me a couple of amazingly detailed flowers molded out of bread.

that warning came not in the last few weeks, when it seemed everyday brought revelation of another chinese export that was a health hazard, but last year, when word of shady food processing practices was making the round in the chinese-american media.

at the time, i dismissed it largely as whatever. at worst, i thought, it was just business chinese-style: taiwanese, chinese, and local chinese-american food producers clawing each other bloody for market shares. but now, with the front page of the new york times announcing recalls or import ban of chinese-made foodstuff, my mom felt vindicated.

“don’t eat in chinese restaurants anymore,” she said a few days ago.

growing up, i’ve heard the “made in…” label used as code for shoddy craftsmanship and poor q.c., applied first to japanese and then to taiwanese goods. and now china.

the difference is: a clock-radio that runs slow wouldn’t kill you.

my dad had long ranted about the lack of real altruism in chinese culture. “'public' good means friends and family,” he snorted.

frankly, the whole thing pisses me off. not because who's right or wrong but because being chinese, the embarrassment verges on shame.

i know i’m oversimplifying the shit out of the issue, but the embarrassment feels like shame.

but it’s a little harder for me to grasp how different life was for my parents’ generation since they seem so much more immediate and connected to my life.

a friend of my dad, for instance, was also raised by his uncle and aunt. his father died in a plane crash when he was a child and his mother was forced to leave them because his uncle, as head of the old money family, was never able to come to terms with his mother’s peasant background.

when he was a teenager, he and his sister were kidnapped. the family was doing ok but did not have enough money to pay the ransom for both kids. forced to choose, they picked him because he is a boy. so as he watched, the kidnappers killed his sister.

to this date, he would still wake up screaming sometimes. it's not surprising that he also has trouble expressing his feelings. when his kids call, he would say a few words and hand the phone over to his wife. “i don’t know what to say to them,” he told my dad.

good thing daphne and i had anticipated this, albeit closer to the end of our drive than the beginning. like well-drilled commandos, we immediately launched into our pacification routine – a mix of facts and improvised distractions.

“you can’t get out now because we’re driving…would you like mommy to tickle your legs?”

“i want to get out…now,” she said, clearly unimpressed and more irritated.

needless to say, attempts at reasoning with a teary 2 year-old quickly degenerated into straight bribery (“wanna cookie?”). then came the sobbing. i know as parents we’re hardwired to feel like shit when we hear it, but that didn’t make it any less of a relief when she finally whimpered and nodded off.

in all my years in new york, i have never been out on the island further than kings park, and i was there only because of family. not to take anything away from my peeps, but going out to long island just never seemed like a priority. but as the l.i.e. splinters into county roads and subdivisions scatter into small towns and large vineyards, i started to enjoy myself and almost forgot we’re only an hour plus from our midtown crib.

but napa valley it wasn’t. on a milk run to a 7-11, we were surprised that both customers and clerks looked straight outta midwest. with all the greasy tank tops, torn jeans, starchy caps and six packs around us, we might as well have been at one of them quicktrips prying the sides of interstate 70 just outside of kansas city. of course, as soon as they opened their mouth, you know they’ve never been further west than hoboken.

the soundview inn sits just outside of greenport on route 48. it looks and feels like an old skool roadside motel: the rooms are dull but functional, you hear the traffic constantly, and the office is a trailer sitting on cinder blocks jutting into the parking lot. nothing to write home about except the rooms are literally on the beach, 10 ft from the water. looking out of the patio window, all you see is the blue of long island sound.

“nice place to veg for a couple of days,” i thought, before taking ione for her first taste of sand and surf.