Holiday Missive for 2007

Rewards this year were travel and singing, culture and new color at home. It was also a disappointing year for digital camera karma, and continuing outrage and sorrow about ongoing Bush political crimes and our own Nero fiddling while the planet burns.

After last year’s newsletter went to bed, I flew to my niece Claire’s wedding in Minneapolis, and luckily it was 60 degrees warmer at 35 F than the last time I was there (February 1975). A rare family conjunction occurred of all three siblings, niece, nephew and mother in the same room.

(David, sister Lori, brother Mark, and mother Evelyn, Minneapolis, December 2006)

Travel I: Malaysia, Java, Bali

January saw a long trip to Malaysia and Indonesia with weekend stops in Singapore and southern Thailand.

By now I know the ways in and out of Kuala Lumpur from seven sojourns there! I found good food at stalls near my hostel, also enjoyed a lovely butterfly park and orchid park. The symphony hall is underneath the famous twin towers that Lou Harrison in a letter to Scientific American described as two embracing phalli (smiley).

I quit the faery gathering in Thailand early, an unhappy camper, and opted instead for a boat trip into the world’s oldest rain forest, Taman Negara. Of the 6000 species of insect there, only two tried to bite me, and leech season was blessedly over.

Taman Negara Canopy Walk

The “canopy walk” on planks and ladders roped together offered a swinging view 400 feet down to the forest floor. While the forest is millions of years old (older than the Amazon and Congo) the individual trees are only about 250 years, old since they reproduce so rapidly.

I went with my Chinese-Malaysian friend Vic to Penang, and together we discovered a clan house with his surname on it! Then we visited the mansion pictured next, all designed for Feng Shui, for the lucky eighth wife, though Mr. Tze had perhaps not expected a city to grow up around it.

Me in front of the Cheong Fatt Tze Mansion in Penang, where Catherine Deneuve starred in Indochine.

With some more time, I flew to Kuching, Borneo, and got a look at the big stinky Rafflesia flower in bloom. Unfortunately, it killed the new Canon camera to go out in a cool rain, even keeping the camera dry.!

Rafflesia flower, Borneo, camera killer.

On Valentine’s Day I headed for Jakarta, traffic out of Indiana Jones, and a week across Java.. I climbed the 9^th century Buddhist Stupa at Borobudur, a big stone manifestation of a mandala, with bas-reliefs like at Angkor Wat, to instruct the unlettered. Luckily, it was lost for a thousand years before Sir Stamford Raffles, after whom flowers and hotels are named, found it on the way to or from founding Singapore, so it was preserved from attack.

I passed a couple of peaceful nights next to the Indian Ocean at Pangandaran, which was nearly deserted after not one, but two, tsunamis rolled through in 2004 and 2006. It felt odd to be the only guest in a classy hotel; I hope they get their business back!

Borobudur, Java, Indonesia

The night before Borobudur, a fierce rain storm sent 4-inch rocks cascading along the roads (traffic encompasses everything from push carts to logging trucks in two narrow lanes). The driver got a good tip for getting us back to the hotel in one piece. I also took in a Ramayana in Yogyakarta, all those deities and monkeys, which are which?

It may be Java, but I saw only tea growing, no coffee. I guess that’s mostly grown in Sumatra nowadays. Many, many, steamy mountains, as Java sits on 120 active volcanoes, and highways routinely get blocked by mud flows.

Sunrise, Mount Bromo. Java 120 active volcanoes make Java a hotbed!

The second digital camera died in Bali, defective, but Nikon USA won’t replace a full-price camera bought abroad. Boycott!

Singing

I came back to Seattle and rejoined Seattle Pro Musica for some touring concerts in Washington and Oregon, part of the NEA grant we got, then an "American Masterpieces" festival with composer Morten Lauridsen and guest conductor Dale Warland. It got televised, so you can see for yourself (it’s about an hour long) at

www.seattlechannel.org/videos/video.asp?ID=6010715

For October 2008, I signed on to sing a tour with a virtual North American Welsh choir in Patagonia. I didn’t know that there were Welsh settlers in Argentina from the 1860’s. Time to learn Welsh and Argentinean Spanish!

Culture

Writing these missives allows me the pleasure of sifting through a year’s worth of playbills, before consigning them to the basement archives (boxes that may go to the recyclers after I go, but for now…)

Last night I saw a live Nutcracker after 25 years, this on the Pacific NW Ballet with sets by Maurice Sendak, and acrobatics by two of my favorite young male athletic dancers, Ben, and James, who weren't born the last time I saw Nutcracker in SanFrancisco! When my sister came to Seattle we saw an all-Balanchine program, and the new director Peter Boal continues to headline a lot of new works, and new-old works like Cage and Cunningham danced to the sounds of water gurgling from shells.

At Seattle Opera, Nuccia Focile chewed up the scenery Verdi-style in an opera by Gluck, Iphigenia in Tauris, co-produced with the NY Met.

Seattle Art museum opened two (count ‘em !) venues, a free sculpture park, and a new downtown museum, where my friend Ben Gardiner’s great to the nth power grandfather has pride of place in a portrait by Copley.

Composer Jake Heggie, premiered a work for baritone and actor at Music of Rembrance (of the Holocaust) about an elderly gay man being visited by the ghost of his perished lover. Moving beyonds words.

A haughty Brazilian maid and a pair of sisters, a surgeon and a clean freak, in ACT’s “The Clean House” was a barrel of fun, as was Gilbert & Sullivan’s Princess Ida (a parody feminism from Victorian times).

A summer drive to the Olympic Music Festival barn brought my first live performance of Schoenberg’s String Quartet #2 (1908) with a part for soprano about feeling “a breeze from other planets.” The 20^th century really begins for me in a Viennese drawing room when this was first sung.

News from Elders

Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD, turned100 on Jan 7^th. I remember him lecturing in Corvallis, “Maybe you were expecting a guru, but you got a chemist.”

In another approach to longevity, the West Seattle Herald reports that the Bellefuielle couple, married 70 years at ages 95 and 98 swear by a Manhattan cocktail daily at 4 PM without fail!

Kurt Vonnegut took off at he comparatively tender age of 80. His books were full of local color when I read them as an undergrad at Ilium on the Iroquois (Troy on the Hudson).

Travel II Alaska and Europe:

No sooner was the ProMusica festival over, than I flew to Fairbanks, Alaska, for a Zen-like experience of watching the sun “not set” tangent to the Brooks Range, north of the Arctic Circle at the summer solstice. The trip also encompassed a rafting trip down the Copper River, where the wind bore glacial till upstream, stinging my face and and injuring my film camera. I took train and bus to Denali and saw backlit shrouds of cloud, but no mountain, andt some good wildlife shots. Next year I’ll see Everest, so there, nah!

In August I flew to London to see my jolly friends Paul and Alan, who are now a married couple. They took me out with picnic to see Macbeth in Regents Park, with curious Russian music and costumes thrown into the mix. They also sent me to some free museums, one Geffrye adjacent to a Turkish-Ecuadorian block, that’s London for you. A day trip took me Hampton Court where some Tudor parts are preserved, like the enormous kitchens that roasted thousands of animals every year, you name them.

Henry VIII liked Hampton Court so much, he took it from Cardinal Wolsey.

I toured Ireland, alas not with a gay tour, so there was more boy-meets-girl entertainment than my taste. I was impressed with the old stuff: Newgrange, ring forts and passage graves, the medieval monasteries, home to saints and scholars, Viking settlements older than Scandinavia in Vetterfjord (Waterford), the rough scenery of the Kerry Ring and Atlantic Coast, and a now-peaceful passage through the North.

Back in Dublin, the tour guide at Trinity was just finishing a bachelor’s in Relativity and we had a good chat about Einstein-Cartan theory on the way to see the Book of Kells. Of course, a pint o’ Guinness (makes you strong) at their new aerie east of downtown.

A reconstructed Viking ship (the 11th century original of Irish manufacture) had just arrived on the Liffey when I did, and I got a look at it when they hauled it up at the Crafts Museum. At 100 feet long it was tight quarters for the 54 men, 18 women who sailed it from Rosskilde, Denmark. Tight quarters are a plus when you’re an undergrad.

The Sea Stallion in Dublin

Since Viking ships were an emerging leitmotif, my next stop was Oslo (the expensive: $5 coke, $16 beer, $45 bread and soup). They still have Blue Laws, so on Sunday, you take a walk in the parks:

Vigeland Park, Oslo

Later I saw the well-preserved Viking burial ships, and pondered the connection between the tree-trunk that forms the support for the mast, and the World-Ash Tree from the Nibelungen sagas and Wagner’s Ring.

In Stockholm, I saw a more modern, and unlucky ship “Vasa” that sank in 1628 15 minutes after launch It seems that the King, making war on Poland, ordered a new second gun deck that toppled it over. The inquiry commission was unable to find anyone at fault, just like today’s Valerie Plame case. We know who was in charge, but lack the political will to convict the guilty in power.

Other places in Stockholm I enjoyed were the Baroque theater at Drottningholm Palace (Bergmann shot the Magic Flute there in 1975) where I got to run the wind machine, and the Swedish Academy where the Nobel Institute shows a film of Feynman at the bongos, and around the corner is a gay-owned hot chocolate cafe.

It was Linnaeus (Swedish Linne)’s 300^th birthday, so I took in botanical gardens in three capitals. In the garden in Copenhagen, there is a handy take-away guide to the poisonous plants there, in case murder or suicide were on your agenda.

I liked the idea of the main part of town being an amusement park, full of kids and dogs. I saw a lot of baby buggies, perhaps because the Europeans don’t encapsulate their kids in two tons of S.U.V.!

Copenhagen Tivoli Amusement at the center of things

Surgery and the Netflix Coccoon.

When I was in Alaska, one of the fellows on the trip was a retired orthopedist who my limp. After several consultations and scans at home, a foot specialist had a surgical plan for a tendon release and external removable brace, which seems to work fine now. This entailed about six weeks at home with bed rest and crutches., and help from my friend Kent. I used the time to catch up remastered cinema: Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa and other “light classics.”I had a bout of synaesthesia when I saw Bergman’s Persona, and thought of the Juno’s “mirror aria” in Handel’s Semele, and parallel beach run to the one in Tarkovski’s “Ivan’s Childhood.”

I give the New York Times a daily going-over, passing on sport, business, and fashion (the doings of the super-greedy) and enjoying arts, especially classical music and dance coverage, and political opinion. Not in the loop, but read about those who are…

I also spend too much time as “Artwit” on the social networking site tribe.net. At least it’s not owned by Bushist liar-in-chief Rupert Murdoch, like MySpace is.

Home Improvement

“A Mouse took a House as a Spouse

Because Mice take Hice as their Spice.”

A Times article struck home, saying that for many single folk, a home takes the place of a relationship, and provides similar feelings of security. My house seemed to know: when I got some money for selling sewer rights to the condo project next door, the water heater and furnace had breakdowns. Money flows in and out, scarcely stopping by for tea.

The dining room in celery green. A bust of Antinous was de rigeur for a gay man in the 18^th century.

I painted up the downstairs rooms, four colors celery in the dining room, and five colors rose in the living room, to go with the stained glass window (front page) that I commissioned from a Vancouver, Canada faerie, Ken Tomilson. It sure looks better than the chicken-wire glass I had for twelve years! I also picked up a commemorative Pendleton blanket in the same colors at the Portland Centennial Rose Parade in June.

I am surrounded by condos! Seattle is only just now feeling a housing pause, but in the meantime my two neighbor houses morphed into eight condos, and I keep getting notes from friendly realtors who wanted to buy my place, so lovingly cared for, to tear down. Sorry, I’m using this house! I also know the meaning of “the whole nine yards” as I had that much gravel to move in a drainage project.

Health

I joined the YMCA in West Seattle, which serves all ages and shapes, rather than the looks-focused gay gyms, so I feel better here. Exercise is a chore rather than something I truly enjoy, but I’m OK with chores as a householder. I like their emphasis on fitness, as opposed to the comminatory tyranny of “lose weight” I have become more fit at the same size. I’m much happier with the fitness ideology, than with incessant pathologizing of my size. In a fit of scientific illiteracy, the Times said you could “catch” obesity from your friends. They also said that most people will continue to condemn their fat friends even when it is known to be a genetic condition. No thanks, coach!

Politics

There was a good, if really disappointing book by Drew Westen of Emory University, “The Political Brain” about the Politics of the amygdala (that little region of the brain that makes emotional snap judgments and is larger in gay men), and how Rove and the right wing smears with emotions whilst the Democrats are “stuck” with logical thinking and reflection, and how emotion trumps logic for Muddle-murricans.

If I had grad school to do over again, I’d do neuropsychology, as scientists and Buddhist practitioners are seeing some of the same things. Westen quotes Antonio Damasio, who wrote “Descartes’ Error” and “The Feeling of What Happens.”

Westen did make some morning-after suggestions that Gore could have used in debating Bush including the words “drunk,” “crooked” and “disgrace” after Bush insulted him. Likewise, Carter could have made more of Reagan’s pandering to racists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by saying he wasn't riding a white gorse, he was wearing white sheets. Southern fried racism is still the Repiglicans stock in trade 140 years after the Civil war supposedly ended.

Bill Clinton is underlining Westen’s points for Hillary, so I fear we are in for yet more triangulation. I don’t like Hillary, but I’ll probably have to hold my nose and vote for the Democrat as usual. She voted for the Iraq war, gave Cheney cover to invade Iran, was a Wal-Mart board member, did zip for labor, has on staff the union-busting consultant Mark Penn, who also did PR for corporate criminal Monsanto (genmod seed fall on a neighbor’s fields, and they sue the neighbor for patent infringement). Chelsea works for… a hedge fund. No billionaire left behind, by either party.

Nor are Democrats likely to cross AIPAC “Israel can do no wrong” in unholy alliance with the “Christian” fundies, who want Armageddon, torpedoing chances for Middle East peace. Look what happened to Jimmy Carter when he told the truth about the apartheid garrison state of Israel. Carter wasn’t the first to use the “A-word” there; Nelson Mandela was; Mandela should know.

My guy is Bill Richardson, who has the best resume, negotiated with Saddam, Darfur, and N Korea, will get us out of Iraq on day one office, built renewable energy in New Mexico, etc. He’s a long shot, but this early I can support him, before the nose-holding is required. Maybe he’ll get slotted where he can do some good.

At the state level, prospects are better, though a mean right-wing mudslinger Rossi is rematching good governor Gregoire. I’m backing a “Clean Elections” organization to get big money out of politics so we no longer have “the best government money can buy,” as the BBC characterized. As local progressive high roller Alhadeff said, “I’d like to stop having to give money to politicians.”

Future Plans

I plan more Travel and Singing, including Thailand, Nepal (Tibetan New Year at a Monastery), Bali (to see a man I met last year), later on a Caribbean Cruise and San Juan, and the Argentine-Welsh thing, maybe also the Galapagos or the Black Sea, the Rachmaninoff Vespers (every ten years), and more social networking (still no boy friend, must be that I always have disliked making eye contact. Don’t call it Asperger’s. Grr.)

I’m trying to buy carbon offsets for air travel (Denis Hayes calls them the modern equivalent of medieval indulgences for sale), but the market is confusing. Maybe there’s a need for “carbon accountants” who can use real physical models, not guesswork, for air travel. Airlines know how much carbon they deposit, and could be required to publish the data. I’m trying to report on this for the Sierra Club.

A home, I have to fix a leaky windowsill where the wind blows up from below, (wind turbine??) and then paint the bedroom and office in cheery colors.

Then there’s throwing out the bums in D.C. and beginning the lifelong challenge of undoing their damage to the planet, America’s reputation, workers, the middle class, and international security…

Good Wishes

Well, that was rather a long and windy, like the weather we’re having, but at least you got some color pictures this time. Let me send best wishes, and daily Manhattans if you choose, for the coming year, from my home, to yours:

David Kerlick