Winter 2008 Holiday
Greetings from David Kerlick
And a Cast of “Thousands”
West Seattle, December 14. Time again for that cup of tea and a fire in the ‘place and for good measure a frigid day and snow outside, balanced by a morning of singing John Rutter’s “Gloria” and all that brass. It was again a year of travels and singing, for which I am grateful, even more so the hopeful end of the criminal Bush presidency, even as world events seem to be in free fall.
I visited Thailand as a base for last winter’s trip, idling at Pattaya Beach, and realizing that idleness doesn’t suit me very long, so I won’t retire there! Bangkok is a more interesting future wintering spot.
I went on to an adventure in Nepal, complete with power outages, a bandh or blockade by the Maoist faction talked through by a skillful driver, rescuing a Russian lady in distress, earlier taking in stunning views of the Annapurnas (plurabelle) from the ground and Everest from the air. One becomes snow blind just looking out the airplane (Buddha Air) window. I also visited the Buddha’s birthplace in Lumbini, about 4 km from the Indian border.
I had arranged to be at a Tibetan Buddhist Tharlam Monastery for Tibetan New Year. This was where Bertolucci’s “little Buddha” from Seattle ended up, though they have a 5 year old on the throne now! I describe Tibetan as “noisy Buddhism” and the Losar lunar New Year was no disappointment. I didn’t expect to see monks setting off firecrackers and rockets and throwing kerosene on burning altars!
The
Pyro-Monks
of Tharlam, Bodhanath, Nepal
I returned to Bali in hopes of seeing a man I connected with last year, but he was sick, so we had one lunch, and it was storming, so I read a lot of books in my hotel room, with just one day out to see Walter Spies’s version of the Kecak “Monkey Chant,” lunch by a volcano, and some ritual dances with gamelan.
The summer trip took me multimodally about the Black Sea, to Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, the Crimean and the Dnieper river in Ukraine, ending in Kiev.
In Bulgaria, I liked Plovdiv, the ancient Philippopolis, an old town full of art, thanks to a beneficent “mayor.” The low point was getting out of Bulgaria and into Romania, on a Soviet train from the 50’s, never maintained since then, seemingly abandoned for hours at a siding, and unmarked train stations. Evidently if you don’t know where you are, you’d better not get out! Romania was an intense cultural tour, with painted monasteries of the 15th Century too numerous to mention, as well as the castles of Teutonic Knights in Transylvania. Gee, I only knew them as the bad guys in “Alexander Nevsky!”
The
Greek philosophers al
fresco, sans halos. Plato wears an Ideal on his head.<
Moldova was an interesting break, with a hundred miles of underground wine cellar and 1.9 million bottles just in the rare wines department. They have a potential to be a power in organic wine production, since they never could afford pesticides, once they stop making the syrupy stuff for the Russians, and get a less corrupt government. Yuri Gagarin spent a night
there, drinking we might suppose! I avoided the breakaway Transdniester region, not wishing to be shaken down for a bribe, so as a result saw a lot of back roads on the way to Odessa.
I joined friends Lee and Hal in Odessa for a cruise of the Crimean (Sevastopol and Yalta) and the Dnieper River up to Kiev. Yalta has better views than the Friench Riviera on high, but the boardwalk is Atlantic City! A Cossack horsemanship show was fun: the styles of the 16th Century look a lot like the postpunks of 21st Century Seattle.
Cossacks in Zaporozhia, Ukraine
In October, I joined with the North American (virtual) Welsh choir for a tour of Welsh settlements in Patagonia. In 1865, the US was closed to immigrants on account of the Civil War, and Argentina needed to settle the Chilean borders, so voila!
First I visited Iguazu Falls and Montevideo, Uruguay.
Iguazu up close and personal
Iguazu Falls had a deluxe hostel that used to be a casino. Capirinhas by the pool, and a family friendly park with too many birds and butterflies to count, a red-spotted one liked me (or my sunscreen) and as wet as you want to get.
Then I flew back to Buenos Aires and took the hour ferry and bus to Montevideo, a gay “bears” B&B in the old Palermo district of Montevideo, but alas the town was mostly closed on Sundays. Colonia, an old official Portuguese smuggling town across the River Plate from Buenos Aires, was quainter.
I joined the Welsh tour in Buenos Aires, and visited the formerly disorderly port, La Boca, and the establishments like the one pictured below:
El Samovar de Rasputin, Buenos Aires
Towards the end of Patagonia, we went to Punta Tombo (44 S 65 W) to see the Magellan Penguins having a good old time surfing and mating:
Magellan Penguin, Punta Tombo, Argentina.
Alas, the final tour party led to another bout of food poisoning and then a cancelled flight with a nice room in a modernist hotel, but the illness dampened my enthusiasm.
In other areas of my life:
The
master bedroom in “Heavenly
Blue”
and “Kensington Green”
Lincrusta™.
Five color paint job! Track Lighting!
Could it be more gay?
I’ve been nourishing my mind absent many nearby compatriots by reading in the area of evolutionary neuropsychiatry, which to me seems ablaze with new discoveries about where language, moral sense, and prejudices come from. I liked Steven Pinker’s “The Language Instinct” and the broader moral and spiritual areas in disproving the notion in “The Blank Slate.” We evidently owe more to our genetic background than we thought, and what we have discovered leaves less room than ever for magical thinking, “the ghost in the machine,” or what Einstein, following Spinoza, would have called “spooks!”
Three old men passed away who influenced my life. Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD at age 102, John Wheeler, my thesis advisor (we were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but he was unfailingly polite) age 96, and John Burnside, one of the founders of the Radical Faeries, and Harry Hay’s lover, in San Francisco, aged 92, who passed whilst I was visiting.
This year’s sort of the programs bin turns up some interesting correlations. I saw two plays about unrequited gay relationship among schoolmates. “Black Black White Stork” by the Ilkhom Theater of Uzbekhistan about a madrasa in Tashkent, and “bare” at Arts West about a Catholic boarding school in the U.S.
Seattle Symphony did a lot of “multimedia” with the film “Alexander Nevsky,” with Mark Morris Dance, and with a troupe of Acrobats (Cirque de la Symphonie). Besides the Pro Musica invitation to sing the Mahler 8th, there was a pickup choir to sing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy for the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. That pair could travel as a comedy team if they changed professions, with Tutu always pulling the rug out from the straight man Lama.
PNW Ballet continues to provoke with new and newish works, including two Twyla Tharp commissions and an evening of Jerome Robbins. They also split a bill with Eugene, Portland, and San Francisco called “4 by 4” that I went to Portland to see.
I saw two very different operas “I Puritani” in Seattle with a high F for tenor and not much for the chorus to do, and “Bonesetter’s Daughter,” libretto by Amy Tan, in San Francisco. Odd for a principal to be flown for the whole production! Maybe Chinese classical singing can be done that way. Bel Canto certainly not!
Every ten years, I sing the magnificent Rachmaninoff All Night Vigil (“Vespers”). The last two times were with Seattle Pro Musica, most recently at St. James Cathedral in Seattle, where I had a small solo.
Dubya continues to disgrace himself by holding a fire sale of America’s natural patrimony and taking a wrecking ball to the Endangered Species Act. Would that the neocon species went extinct instead! They know the price of everything and the value of nothing…
Yes, we did! Everyone I talked to outside the U.S. was Obama all the way, and “How could Americans have been so stupid?” Alas, it’s the old playbook of emotionalism, the latest incarnation being Sarah “know nothing” Palin and the corporate media love affair with her. McCain’s best speech was his magnanimous concession. Had he been like that earlier, he would have had a better showing.
As one of the NY Times writers said, the election of Obama finally ended the Civil War. Even the old slave states Virginia and North Carolina voted for him. OK, maybe it’s changing demographics, but the G.O.P. now seem to be supported by the racist remnants of the Deep South only.
I know the new Administration will have flaws, and if Obama does his job, he will spend some of his political capital to get things done. Even when I don’t agree, I expect that the Obamans will at least thought things through. That alone gives me more hope than in a long time, and makes me feel like “we” rather than “they” are running things. Imagine, a Nobel Prize physicist as Sec. of Energy, and my guy Bill Richardson got a job in Commerce (I would have preferred State) as well. I’m not so sure of Hillary, as she voted for the Iraq war on a political triangulation, and never repented of it, but I guess Barack wants the Clintons inside where he can keep an eye on them, rather than outside throwing rocks!
I never picked “gay marriage” for the top of my agenda and calling supporters of civil unions “bigots” is a counterproductive exaggeration. Say “marriage” and people think “religion.” Instead, all anybody, hetero or homo, should expect from the Government is a contract of rights and responsibilities. Leave religious ceremonies to the religions. Benefits like health care should be universal, and not dependent on employment or marital status! Instead, we could be working on the housing and employment rights we still lack in 35 states, and which Obama could possibly deliver.
Enough already. Let’s get the missive in the mail, and a toast (your choice of beverage) to you in the new year!
– David Kerlick
