Steve and I took a trip on a little 4-seater plane to Golden Bay, NZ last weekend, perhaps catching the last bit of sunny weather for the season. It’s now decidedly gray and drippy. Winter has arrived while Americans are all planning their Memorial Day barbecues. Anyway, that’s me in front of the Piper Saratoga which felt like we were flying in a kite as it drifted left and right and up and down in the high Wellington winds. We took off into the wind and the plane was up in the air within, no kidding, 100 feet. On the way there I got to sit next to the pilot and watch all the gauges and dials. Very fun.

Now at sea level…Golden Bay is a spectacularly beautiful spot on the planet with gorgeous sandy beaches that reminded me of the beach scene in the movie Contact where Jodie Foster meets her father…

This beach is Goat Bay in Abel Tasman national park. The water was freezing but the air warm. We did go in and as you can see, there was not a soul around to witness it. We had the beach entirely to ourselves. There were teeny biting flies all over us that left marks on our bodies, so don’t salivate too much. Here’s the aerial view from the plane on the way home.

Here you can watch the video of the weekend:

 
Here are a couple panoramas from the trip. Please click on the image to enlarge it to its full width:

Click to enlarge panorama.

Click to enlarge panorama.

And from the “You Don’t See That Everyday in America” department, this traffic sign from Wellington…

I have yet to see a penguin holding up traffic but if I do, you’ll be the first to know.

I finally made it. There it is and here I am: New Zealand! It’s a place I had never really expected or even wanted to visit — never felt the burning urge. But my newly expatriated friends Steve and Tom beckoned me to visit them in Wellington. So I heeded the call and booked the flight.

I packed for weeks to get my life condensed down to one small carry-on bag for 4 months of travel through 1st, 2nd, and 3rd worlds in northern and southern hemispheres which means both winter and summer climates. (I plan to travel from here to Southeast Asia.) The months leading up to the trip seemed to drag on, time itself getting longer and longer as the departure date drew nearer. Finally the day came and I stepped into the portal called Air New Zealand…

The flight was great. Very luxurious jet with 3 empty seats next to me so I was able to lie down and eat Xanax in peace. When I emerged from the portal, here’s what I saw. My first glimpse of New Zealand. This is actually a color photograph:

The Monday I arrived brought torrential rains and winds. It felt like a hurricane, actually. Then we had an earthquake in the afternoon. I had heard that Wellington was notoriously windy but this was ridiculous. The wind was so strong it would actually stop me from walking. I could lean into it and stay standing. My first day walking around, my pants just stayed soaked through. Everyone assured me this was not typical NZ weather. Though it is naturally windy here, that day was something special.

Now, let me just get all the negative stuff out of the way first. So I arrived in a storm that wasn’t just climatic in nature. Sadly, Tom and Steve have decided to end their relationship of nearly 7 years. It is painful for both of them and painful for me to witness as their friend. I find myself trying to be small and not get caught in the crossfire, which of course is impossible for me being both a big personality and a sensitive person in a small apartment. The house is full of heartbreak with everyone trying to stay safe. I love them both and that’s all I will say publicly about their relationship. Here’s a picture of Tom I shot one morning that I think captures the mood at home.

Seeing this dissolution happen before my eyes has left me even more doubtful of human relations and believe me, after Sebastian left I was already pretty dubious of love. Can’t we ever get along? Can’t love ever last? I always thought that love was forever. Hah! We are all such complicated beings. What one day feels like love, the next day vaporizes and turns to contempt and hatred. Is love real or just some sort of volatile elixir that softens us one moment and then look out when it wears off? Is life better off just avoiding all such pain and disappointment entirely, never getting close enough to be burned? Or is the good stuff in life gleaned by reaching out knowing full well that you’re going to get hurt? My personal jury is out on that one.

Back to New Zealand and more specifically Wellington which is where I am currently roosting at Steve’s place.

Wellington looks and feels remarkably like San Francisco. After having lived 14 years in the Bay Area of California, coming to New Zealand feels like I’m am back in the windy green environs of Northern California. The architecture, the topography, the weather, the Bay — it feels like I just discovered a new neighborhood in SF where there are no homeless people and everyone speaks with a British accent. Oh, one other thing, it’s almost entirely white people with a sprinkling of Asian and Pacific Islanders. This is the wonderful Cuba Street — a pedestrian mall that is full of pubs, thrift stores, and restaurants. Just to make me seem like an idiot proclaiming there are no homeless people here, notice in the photo the guy on his knees. He was drunk and stumbled to the ground just as I shot the picture. OK, so no place is perfect. A woman did go over and offer assistance in a kind sort of Kiwi way.

Wellington is the café heart of the country. I hear Auckland is like Los Angeles and everyone says that Wellington is where the groovy, alternative, coffee house-going people gravitate to. How they sit outside in the cold and wind is a testament to the tough New Zealand stock. Women don’t wear much makeup or hose. High flying fashion is not a priority here. They often are seen in bare feet and shorts on a day when I’m wearing no less than 3 layers of wool and thermal underwear. It’s not just that I’m skinny because Kiwis are not fat. The country is vastly trim and healthy looking.

There’s a sweet vibe in the air, the cops don’t carry guns, and it doesn’t feel like a nation on the verge of a nervous breakdown like the one I left behind. This is a what a country with a safety net looks like. I don’t think the US is ever going to get the greater wisdom that a country can be sustainable and secure if it invests in its infrastructure and the people’s health, education, and welfare rather than wasting it on its military. The US doesn’t get that real security is obtained by enriching the lives of  the people rather than arming them. In the US, everyone is left to his own to succeed or fail. Unfortunately this puts people under a lot of stress, making the country a bit greedy if they succeed, disaffected if they fail, and praying to some god to make it all better. Hey, it’s America’s 3G network: Guns, God and Greed.

And this dear friend, is the beauty of traveling. It gives you better perspective on your own life and country.

The Tucson Botanical Garden has a wonderful living butterfly exhibit. My friend Jean and I went into the humid bubble to experience them…

Singing backup in a rock band isn’t really something I ever imagined I would be doing but hey, I’ll try almost anything once. Last night at the historic Fox Theater in downtown Tucson, I sang with a very small part of the Tucson Symphony Chorus as backup for a rock performance of the music of Queen with a traveling band called Jeans ‘n Classics. (Is that the most aging baby boomer band name you’ve ever heard?) People in their 50′s and 60′s were clapping along and dancing in their seats to rock and roll music presented by a symphony orchestra. Soon retirement homes will be having Freddie Mercury look alike contests and Pink Floyd music night in wheelchairs at the rec hall. Lawrence Welk’s days are numbered.

Super cute conductor Keitaro Harada during rehearsal.

Singing rock is, to say the least, a very different experience than classical. Classical music is highly, highly controlled and refined. We will work on a classical piece for months and months. Here we had 2 rehearsals. Classical is all about blending and the painfully precise sculpting of subtleties in a score. A classical conductor would never assemble a chorus that was as out of balance as ours was yesterday. We had a chorus of 13 with only 4 male singers. We had no real tenor. A bass was re-purposed to be our only tenor and so his voice was strained to reach high notes. I don’t have perfect pitch but am quite good at matching pitch on the fly, which is why I’m a decent ensemble singer but not a good acapella soloist. Last night my “pitch pipe” the guy you hear most clearly in the bass section was re-purposed to be a barritone. So I was kind of on my own to get pitches from the lead singer who I could not hear because all the amplification system was pointed at the audience and we’re in the back with a full orchestra and rock band between us. So, OK some parts of it were a train wreck that most people didn’t notice.

Here’s a little video from the rehearsal that gives you some idea of what it’s like rehearsing and of course, the beautiful Fox Theater interior…

And here’s a sound sample from my slightly bootlegged recording of the actual live performance. Hopefully no one in the musicians union will object because the quality is so amateur. Now if you listen to this, you’ll hear us singing Bohemian Rhapsody. You’ll hear the crowd go wild at the end which is always fun. During the song, audience members were waving their illuminated cell phones in the air which put a modern spin on the old days when you would strike your lighter and hold it over your head in a rock concert. Anyway, you’ll hear the standing ovation and then we start Fat Bottom Girls which starts out all wrong. We sang for 5 hours that day, this was the last song of the night and we couldn’t hear each other or the lead very well, our ears were pretty trashed from the wall of sound. So forgive that misfire. We got back on track in the 2nd start.

For me it was a special treat in spite of feeling understaffed and not fully prepared for this. The music of Queen is incomparable and enormously fun to sing and listen to. The conductor Keitaro Harada was delightfully cute and competent. Here’s a little documentary piece about this bright young conductor.

With classical music after a concert you feel great because you sang perfectly and by God you earned that applause. You feel triumphant and relieved that you didn’t sing a wrong note and you won’t catch hell from your conductor who doesn’t miss anything. You’re relieved to be done with those grueling rehearsals every night of the week with that conductor beating perfection into you. With rock, you feel good afterward because, well, because the music is designed to make you feel good. Whether or not you sang well, you sang (and so did everyone else in the audience). And if someone’s hearing aid went off or someone dropped their cane on the floor in the middle of the show, you surely didn’t hear it over the wailing guitars. When the standing ovation arrives, you may not exactly feel like you earned it but you know that it’s genuine…and you’re kind of sorry the rehearsals are over.

What do you do when you have a little free time? OK, well, maybe I don’t really want to know about THAT. One of the things I do is scour the web for films about ships, dirigibles, trains or any large moving objects. I like watching them sail, float, crash, sink all in larger than life scale and with the whole world watching. Bizarre, eh? Could be a symptom of a mild case of Aspergers. Whatever its roots, I want to share a recent find. It’s the SS United States…

T H E N

From her website: The SS United States is an historic ocean liner, widely known “America’s flagship.” She is the fastest passenger ship ever built and the largest ever constructed in her namesake nation. The United States still holds the trans-Atlantic speed record and is one of the last great 20th Century ocean liners remaining in the world. Since the vessel’s launch over 60 years ago, she has served as an enduring iconic symbol of American innovation and engineering might.

From me: The reasons I find this ship interesting are several fold. First, she was made in America. In half a century we as a nation have lost our ability to make things and I think it’s important to remember the legacy of America as we circle the drain. Second, she’s big. From stem to stern she is 10 feet shy of 1,000 feet. Third: She was fast with a maximum speed of 44 mph but cruised at 35 mph or so. No other passenger ship has ever matched her speed. She crossed the Atlantic in 3 days and still holds the world record for that. Today it takes the Queen Mary 2 twice as long to do it. For crying out loud you could water ski behind her. And if you didn’t know what the SS meant. It means Steam Ship — another reason to love this ship. All passenger vessels nowadays are diesel.

Here’s a sweet little 8mm video made of a trip to the Carribean on the SS United States in the year of my birth: 1964. It was a time when the men wore crew cuts, the women wore kerchiefs and the kids wore dresses and bow ties. But perhaps not a good year for fashionable eyewear…

 

Finally what I love about this ship most: she’s in ruins. I love a good story of decaying grandeur, a story of riches to rags. The flagship of America is slowly coming apart, rusting, peeling and if not restored, she will eventually become a coral reef. Sigh.

N O W

She’s docked in Philadelphia, completely stripped of every furnishing.

I never really liked Brussels sprouts — mostly because they smelled bad cooking them. Then a couple years ago I discovered the proper way to cook them.

Simply put, I barbecue them. I got these fresh from the Tucson Village Farm. Then I steam them for about 4-5 minutes until you can run a skewer through them without smushing them. I then brush them with butter and sprinkle them (lightly) with garlic powder. So here’s what they look like at this point before the grilling…

Then, put them on a medium high flame on the grill, close the lid and stand by. Don’t go off and start surfing the Internet or you will come back to a smoldering pile of leaves. It takes only a few minutes. Turn them and then when they’re lightly burned, pull ‘em off. Season with salt and pepper and a teeny bit of lemon juice (optional).

Yumm yumm!

Last night I was at the annual open house for the Technicians for Sustainability here in Tucson. I was chatting with someone about the fact that the Pope had just surrendered her red slippers for brown ones upon abdicated the throne. This conversation then dovetailed into the Wizard of Oz and ruby slippers — a subject near and dear to me as I do believe the WofO is the best film EVER and contains all the wisdom one needs to know in life. This amused Duncan Hudson with whom I was chatting. He told me something shocking: that L. Frank Baum had Judy, I mean Dorothy, wearing silver slippers, not ruby ones in his original book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. But when MGM made the film and it transitioned from black and white to color, they needed pumps that popped! So they took artistic license with the original novel and clad Dorothy in ruby red sequined shoes, not bland silver. History was made and hearts were won forever.

So I asked Duncan how he knew this fascinating factoid and he said, “My great, great grandfather was L. Frank Baum.” No shit. I nearly peed my pants, to mix my excretory metaphors. I hadn’t felt this close to royalty since I met Lorna Luft (Judy Garland’s daughter) at a party in Los Angeles. So I had to get a picture with me. Here he is, the great, great grandson of the late great L. Frank Baum…

L. Frank Baum’s great, great grandson. I can definitely see the resemblance.

THEN…don’t ya just know it, golly I was on a roll! The very next guy I talked to at the TFS party was a guy who claimed to be descendant from Pope Julius (who dutifully wore his papal red slippers no doubt). Here he is and goshdernit, I could see the resemblance too…

Random guy at party and his forebear Pope Julius.

What a night of coincidence and all based on red slippers!

Look at this wonderfully creative movie they made out in my favorite little desert hamlet. The movie is about their defeat of the proposed SunZia power lines that were to run right through the Pedro River valley which would have ruined the place. They fought hard and defeated the project! (Liner note: I happen to know that these people don’t do drugs, so even more kudos for their sober imaginative minds.)

 

Tuesday night an emergency alert alarm went off on my iPhone informing me of severe winter weather conditions and possible blizzard in Tucson. I kind of laughed as it was not that cold. It was still in the 60s.

University of Arizona webcam shot February 21, 2013

We joked about it until the next morning about 11 am the flurries began until we had a bona fide snowstorm with some minor accumulations which are STILL on the ground almost 24 hours later and the Santa Catalina mountains are completely snow covered right down to the valley floor. I’ve never seen anything like this! And I moved to Arizona to escape the cold?

Here’s a little video of this strange weather event…

And here are a few photos I shot yesterday…

My big accomplishment of late has been singing the Verdi Requiem with the Tucson Symphony. We only had 6 rehearsals before we met with the orchestra and then had 3 more with them. The soloists were spectacular. We performed to over 4,000 people over 2 days. Here’s a little sound recording I made from the risers. The quality is not great b/c I’m in the risers and you hear a lot of Gary, the bass singer next to me. You can also hear one of the spectacular soloists from the Met they brought in: Amber Wagner, soprano. You can also hear what a fabulously bombastic piece it is and you can hear the crowd giving us a 3.5 minute standing ovation. 

Here’s a shot that I just have to post because the Tucson Music Hall is about the ugliest, dumpiest building I’ve ever been in and this is what the dressing rooms look like. Untouched since the 70s.

Here’s my post performance glow face with Gail next to me.