My American "bonenkai" season

During my years in Japan, December was bonenkai season, time for "forget the year" gatherings among friends and co-workers. The tradition grew out of drinking parties at work, where supposedly bosses and employees could speak the truth and all that would be forgotten by the next morning. It was never quite like that for me. Our school parties were usually delicious dinners and polite talk, a departure from our sometimes mind-numbing faculty meetings, those broken only by the excitement of someone actually speaking their mind. I digress....

This December, when so many of us needed a "forget the election" break, the Christmas-Hanukkah season brought some excellent opportunities to do just that--though it proved impossible to really forget the guy due to take office in January, as new horrors unfolded everyday. Still, I tried, and before the season slides into a more purposeful new year, I want pull out the best moments, thanking all those who shared with me times of  joy and hope and good food and company, all those essential things for life and survival.

The season opener for me was the annual Lavender Gala, designed for LBGT elders in Boulder County. And since we've all had a lifetime to hone our party skills, it was a lavish affair. The invitation postcard with a collage of photos from the 2015 gathering, shows some of the spirit of the event. (Yes, that's me laughing, left middle). Lots of happy guests, along with our emcee, Ms Eda Bagel (upper right), and dance instructor extraordinaire, Susie Pringle (lower left)

This year was just as much fun--with entertainment, door prizes, dancing, and a tasty buffet. Two photos from that afternoon at Nissi's Bistro in Lafayette. My dance partner in this artistic blur of red is Susan Osborn.



It seems dancing was the theme of early December, as I also enjoyed the holiday party of the Rocky Mountain Rainbeaus square dance club. Our unique blend of campiness, nerdiness and just plain silliness might be reflected in this 2015 photo. The theme was Hawaii in December, and here are a few of my dance partners during a break. I have totally forgotten why our caller, Bear Miller, is holding a red crab. At right is a photo from this year's party. By pleasant mistake, I'm wearing my Edo 8's badge--the club I belonged to when I first learned square dancing in Japan.



More dancing--this time with me as an audience member--was a visual treat when I attended the holiday concert of the Denver Gay Men's Chorus. One number was their gender-playful rendition of The Nutcracker Suite.

My best spiritual moment this year was an impromptu Solstice ceremony Dec. 21 at Deb Taylor's house. Her housemate, Kate, orchestrated it--with beautiful music, readings, and candles that we lit, knowing that the longest night of the year had just passed and the days would now be getting progressively longer. No photos from that night; just picture 3 flickering candles and whatever poem or reading you would contribute if you were there. I chose one by Mary Oliver, called Mindful.

More music: Two days before Christmas a group of fellow residents here in Montview Manor organized a carol singing event, starting in the penthouse and coming down to each floor, inviting anyone to join them. I'm on 11, so it wasn't long before they arrived and I accompanied them down to the lobby, floor by floor. Marion (with Santa hat and tambourine), a retired music teacher, tried to keep us all on key.

Christmas fell on a weekend this year, and Saturday morning was my date with my adopted niece Sable Rall and her family--husband, Ted, 7-year-old James, 5-year-old Lily and canines Hunter and Sosha. After a tasty split-pea soup lunch, James and Ted took off to do errands and the rest of us bundled up for a walk through their sunny neighborhood. Somehow I never got us all still enough for a photo, but the images remain: Sable pushing Lily's stroller over still-snow-encrusted curbs, with dogs attached--an amazing feat in strength and coordination. It had been a long time since we had an uninterrupted talk, so that morning's discussion was truly welcome and hopefully the beginning of many more in '17.

And then afternoon rolled into evening and I travelled over to Sharon and Denise's place nearby for  Christmas Eve dinner. A gourmet event it was, thanks to Denise's patient prep and cooking. We started with a blind champagne tasting, a French version in one bottle and a New Mexican equivalent in another. As is often the case, the French version won, with bubbles literally bursting on the tongue. Then came a vegetarian soup with a base that took hours to make, a crab cake main course, flavorful mushrooms, a uniquely-flavored cranberry dish and key lime pie for dessert.  Feasting was followed by an exchange of Christmas stockings, filled with small, silly and surprising gifts. Sharon and I have known each other since the '80s, when I spent a number of Christmas Eves with her and then-partner Nancy, and Nancy's mom, Helen. Lots of laughter and food and silly or sweet gifts then too. Below are photos of Sharon (holding Frosty), Denise (far right), and their other guest, Teresa.

The next day, was Sunday, Christmas Day, another occasion for feasting and lovely company. Sally Perisho, who I first met when she moved to Denver from Illinois in the late 70s, invited me to dinner at her beautiful, art-filled home in Littleton. Gourmet chefs there were Sally and our long-time friend, Gayle Novak, and I was the lucky beneficiary, along with two other friends of theirs. I humbly contributed some cheese, while the chefs put together a delicious, color and taste-balanced meal of pork roast, brussel sprouts, scalloped potatoes, and cranberries, accompanied by wine. Sally, a retired art curator, is not pictured below, but her dinner table creation is, in front of happy guests anticipating all the bites to come. (From left: Kathy, Mimsy, me and Gayle). At right is Sally's Siamese, Remy, my long-time feline crush, winning the fashion award. (Not pictured: Violet, her stylishly attired canine sister.)

Gifts and conversation continued, smiles around, and then we drove off into the evening, streets nearly empty, and I arrived home safely, counting my Christmas treasures like beads on a rosary. A year to forget and also to remember.

A room with a view--and a balcony

I'm facing City Park as I write this, having moved into a one-bedroom apartment nearby in October. After two years on the wait list, I was thrilled to be offered a unit with a long balcony facing the park I first discovered back in the late 70s. It's on the 11th floor--the highest I've ever lived--high enough that street distractions don't interfere with a wide view of the park's small lake, winding paths and trees. "I'll take it," I remember saying without hesitation when I was shown the apartment in September. By mid-November, the park was on the cusp of winter, and I took this photo as the morning light covered the tree tops.



I'm lucky enough to have a corner apartment with an east view. This was the scene in mid-October:



I lived just a few blocks away from City Park throughout the 80s and visited just periodically--as Cheesman Park to the south of my old place was a more favored spot for outings with friends.  A few image memories stand out: as a school bus driver, walking around the lake during my breaks between runs, a clean quiet place to stretch my legs and reflect. Another stroll several years later in '89 on a cold March day with my visiting sister and brother-in-law, shortly before I left for Japan. A warm November day with Paula and Linda, watching and laughing as they played touch football.

My building is just a couple of minutes from a park entrance and I've enjoyed a number of walks there since moving to the neighborhood. This photo, taken in early November, shows the restored park pavilion with a view of the Front Range mountains in the distance.



The pavilion up close, followed by my favorite sculpture, dating back to the early 1900s:





Nearby are several displays of the park's long history, starting in the late 19th century. I enjoy learning the deep history of the park, which adds another layer of seeing. There were concerts and picnics, and even an auto campground in the early 20th century. By 1914 as many as 300 "gasoline gypsies" were camped there every night, with the city offering free fuel and amenities. Later it all got to be too much and the campground was moved elsewhere.



My neighbor, Virginia, who is in her 80s and remembers growing up just east of the park, adds more context. In the summer people sat on risers to listen to free concerts--people didn't sit on the ground then--and in the winter, ice skaters could glide over the pond. It hasn't been cold enough for the pond to solidly freeze over since the 50s, she tells me.

The lake--and the smaller one just behind the pavilion--are just fine for the many birds that winter over or migrate over the park. Canada geese are the resident species--perhaps a thousand or more. Last week, when I joined a morning birding event in the park, I took this photo of geese feeding on the small lake.



It's December, and the first snowfalls have arrived, transforming the park every day. The Denver Zoo, with its holiday light display, is immediately north of the park. Every evening I've been enjoying the display and city lights illuminating the darkness. I tried to capture a photo of the park during first real snowfall last Friday evening and took this shot with my iPhone. It doesn't do nearly enough justice to the loveliness of it all. (Google Denver Zoo lights images for close-ups of the "safari" lights.)



Spring will bring new images and I can hardly wait, though of course I will.

Standing Rock and Big Mountain: two issues, two eras, same movement

Just a few days before the Dec. 3 Standing Rock victory--the decision by the Army Corps of Engineers to reroute the contested pipeline segment--I discovered an old photo from another battle for water rights. I was standing with friends in front of Safeway one November afternoon in Denver, circa 1980, and we were in costume, handing out flyers about the "true story" of Thanksgiving. Here I am (right) with Marty Mathers (center) and Kim Womantree, dressed as pilgrims and Indian, ready to talk about our interpretation of the Thanksgiving story as one of continuing oppression. That oppression was then taking place then on Indian land at Big Mountain in the Four Corners region. A lot of Indian water was being used there to transport coal in slurry pipes.



I don't remember that we had too many real conversations with Thanksgiving-dinner shoppers that day, but we enjoyed the event and felt we were contributing to the support work local activists were doing at Big Mountain, also known as the Black Mesa coal fields. There corporate interests, especially Peabody Coal Company, were exploiting land shared by Navajo and Hopi tribes, to mine coal at Black Mesa. The precious aquifer, the only source of water for the tribes, then became the source of water to carry the coal in slurry pipes to feed power plants in Arizona and Nevada. Billions of gallons of precious ground water.

Of course, there was no Internet then, and like the struggle at Standing Rock, this was hardly a story that made mainstream news. Nevertheless, there were stories in counterculture papers and some of our friends travelled to the area to oppose the exploitation of the land. But then the issue dragged on in the courts, as such often do, and our own political work continued on in other ways. A line from a Judy Grahn poem, "A Woman is Talking to Death", ran through my mind: "(W)e left, as we have left all of our lovers, as all lovers leave all lovers, much too soon to get the real loving done." Substitute "causes" for "lovers", and you see the parallel.

Finding these photos in my friend Vickie Barriga's collection, I wondered what had become of the Big Mountain issue, 35 years later. I found some answers in a 2014 review of Judith Nies' Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West. "The Indians were not the major players" in the deals taking place on their own land, Nies writes. "The real story was about energy and resources, about how coal was going to be used, and about who would make money." The leases the energy companies got from the US Interior Department violated every guideline the department had set up and the royalties were outrageously low. It was all done legally, Nies wrote, and Black Mesa became a "crucial resource colony for the expansion of the New West". By the late 1990s, the company strip mining Black Mesa was sold to a British takeover specialist,  Lord James Hanson. The review of Nies book reports, "At a 1996 stockholders' meeting in London, Hanson is surprised by the arrival of a delegation of Hopi and Navajo Indians who proceed to describe the effects of coal mining on their desert home: polluted water holes that kill their sheep, skyrocketing asthma rates caused by coal dust, and land stripped of vegetation that will never grow back thanks to desertification."

The parallel to Standing Rock seems obvious. Again, Native tribes--and the rural poor surrounding them-- are likely to pay the cost of our energy policy, still based in fossil fuels. There is reason to believe that Sunday's victory may be a mirage. A day later, the company building the DAPL announced they plan to continue building without rerouting. The pipeline, one of many crisscrossing the country is already more than 90 percent complete. The validity of 19th century treaty rights has long since been set aside in constitutional law. The President-Elect is an investor, and even if private gain were not an issue, he is advocating privatization of Native lands for energy development. Meanwhile, pipelines crisscross the nation, spills continue, the nation continues its dependency on fossil fuels.

Yet, there is reason to believe that Standing Rock can succeed in ways Big Mountain did not. I believe it is truly a victory, whether or not the pipeline is rerouted. As I write, about 10,000 protesters are camped at Cannonball, North Dakota, where the weather today is 4F and more snow is on the way. Clearly they have resilience and staying power. Tribes have come together. Millennials and their elders have come together, US military veterans have arrived to assist the water protectors. Thanks to social media, support has grown and mainstream media is now involved. A new generation is learning about Native American history, the risks of pipelines, the alternatives to a fossil fuel economy. This learning is all part of a movement that will certainly grow. The indefensible violation of civil rights by law enforcement on the land in recent weeks may be to this movement what attack dogs and beatings were to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s--a galvanizing force.

I think back to the struggle to save Big Mountain in the 70s and 80s with sorrow and compassion for all of us who gave up too soon, who left our causes (lovers) too soon. Protestors have tools today that we didn't even dream of: the power of Facebook as a truth-telling arena and a decentralized media, the understanding of and growth of opposition to climate change, the growth of alternative energy worldwide, and best of all, a belief in their ability to succeed. Perhaps my generation, those members who became history teachers and taught a different version of Native American history can claim some credit in the process.

Last month I attended a rally on the University of Denver campus in support of Standing Rock. I think these two photos, one of students who spoke and the other of the audience, show something of the passion and determination in this movement. I look forward to finding new ways to support their vision and efforts in 2017. Here are the photos:

"Casablanca" and "Allied": different fundamentals apply

I was thinking about the movie Casablanca the other day, wondering how many times I've seen this iconic film. Surely at least a dozen times, probably beginning in my early adolescence. Undoubtedly, I saw it on TV, as I was part of the first generation able to see outside of a movie theater. It's been on TV and in theaters for more than half a century now. I associate it with New Year's Eve, that special time of year full of excitement and longing and nostalgia for times past. One Dec. 31 comes to mind, when I watched it as my partner slept, unable to stay up until midnight. Nothing like a wartime film to remind me how petty my discontent was.

Released in November, 1942, Casablanca stars Humphrey Bogart as Rick, a disillusioned cafe owner in wartime Morocco, who meets his lost love, Ilsa, played by Ingrid Bergman. They were lovers in Paris, but she left abruptly after learning that the husband she believed had died was in fact alive.

"As Time Goes By" was their song. Take a moment to enjoy one of the most memorable scenes from this film. Yes, you must remember this.... Watch below or click on this link.

Now Ilsa is in Casablanca with her husband, Victor, an important fighter in the Resistance to the Nazis. I try to remember what my teenage self might have absorbed from this movie. Less about the war and more about gender roles and adult life, perhaps. Actresses were beautiful,  actors not necessarily; that somewhere there is or was an adult world where important things happened, where people were complex beings who could change over time, where love was public but sex private, where sometimes people had to make sacrifices for the greater good of their country and the world. In later viewings,  I could see other things, such as the dynamics of race relations in the 1940s.

(Spoiler Alert for the film Allied.) I was thinking about Casablanca last Saturday when I saw a new movie that has been compared with it: Allied. This film, which also opens in wartime Casablanca, stars Brad Pitt as Max, a Canadian intelligence agent whose first task is to meet the woman who will pose as his wife, Marianne, a French Resistance fighter played by Marion Cotillard. This film also invokes more of another Pitt film, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, leaving just a superficial resemblance to Casablanca, which was filmed well before the feminist revolution of the late 20th century. Pitt is a trained assassin, sent to kill a German official, and Cotillard is every bit his equal handling a machine gun. This film also has explicit sex, and a sudden change in location mid-film. Pitt and Cotillard escape Morocco and marry in London, where we suddenly see Cotillard giving birth to a daughter in the middle of the Blitz. Then the plot turns: Is Cotillard who everyone thinks she is? Evidence has been found that she is really German, a woman who took over a French woman's identity and is now funneling secrets to the Nazis. A test is set, and if failed, Pitt will be ordered to kill her.  

Clearly, Allied is a plot-driven movie. The suspense had me on the edge of my seat, and only later did I question whether any of the characters made sense. They didn't, I concluded. Character development was definitely sacrificed to action, and secondary characters are stereotyped. What went on in the Cotillard character's mind, other than seeing what a good-looking hunk the Pitt character was? Was she ever a committed Nazi? What changed her mind? How did she learn to speak French so flawlessly? How did this trained assassin fail to find a solution to the intimidation of German agents in England? I wondered what my adolescent self would have made of this movie, had I seen it then. The gender roles would not have been inspiring. It was discouraging enough to realize that I would never look as beautiful as Ingrid Bergman; knowing that I had neither Cotillard's looks or bravado with a gun would have probably done me in. I would have also learned that sacrifice has more to do with saving someone you love than anything about patriotism or the common good.

What the first viewers of Casablanca had that we don't is a context: World War II. The movie was rushed into release to coincide with the Allied invasion of North Africa in 1942. In the US, the war was less than a year old, and people knew that sacrifices had been made and would be required for some time. It resonated with audiences of the time in ways that Allied cannot, and would not, even if set in present-day Syria, for example. There may be national unity about defeating ISIS, but no consensus on what role, if any, we should have in that.

Casablanca opened to good reviews, Wikipedia reports, but it did not get best picture at the 1942 Academy Awards, losing out to In Which We Serve. Its real success came later, thanks to new generations finding their own meanings in it. More than 70 years later, it's considered one of the greatest films of all time. The late movie critic Roger Ebert believed it is so well loved because the "people in it are all so good" and "it's a wonderful gem".  Umberto Eco said it was really a mediocre film, but because it touches on so many archetypes, including the theme of sacrifice, it reaches "Homeric depths."  In 2006 the Writer's Guild of America selected it as "best ever" in its  list of 100 great screenplays. 

Allied has gotten decent reviews (61% on rotten tomatoes). Its computer graphics are light years from what was available in 1942. Costumes, music and strong performances by the actors all contribute to a film that's well worth seeing. Still, I don't expect to watch it again, certainly not on New Year's Eve. I wouldn't mind another viewing of Casablanca. As time goes by, it seems, the fundamental things really do apply.