After yesterday’s grinding 11 hour, three movie, flight from Seattle Marilynn and I landed at Incheon International Airport outside of Seoul and hopped the hour-long Korean Air Lines shuttle into the city. We had reservations at a three star hotel that I booked online, and for the first time in four years we are breaking up the trip to Saigon with a three day stay Korea. We’ve passed through Incheon International a half dozen times but neither of us has ever been into Seoul proper. It sounded like a great idea; Korea is booming – Samsung, Hyundai, Kia, L/G, Daiwoo – and new cities are being built from the ground up to handle the growth. Two years ago I blogged about Incheon International and suggested that it was the world’s best airport and our opinion of South Korea was bolstered by yesterday’s trip from the airport to the city in a comfortable new natural gas powered bus on wide, beautifully engineered, well-lit highways and causeways.
Archive for Uncategorized – Page 77
Last week was all about love – but sometimes love isn’t easy to watch or talk about. Great art is great because it taps into universal truth, but sometimes the truth, even as it is revealed in art, is hard to digest.
Over the last 10 days I’ve seen the following performances: Romeo and Juliette, the ballet, Rigoletto live from the Metropolitan Opera in HD, and Amour, the Oscar-winning Austrian film starring Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant. In spite of the fact that Valentine’s Day fell in there somewhere, it’s not a lineup that promotes optimism about love. All three stories are about love that ends badly. Valentine’s Day we celebrate love with red roses and chocolates but real life isn’t always roses and chocolates.
I was born in Montana. My mother was born in Montana, and my paternal grandparents homesteaded a small farm in the Flathead Valley. Both my parents and my daughter graduated from the University of Montana. I’ve spent most of my life elsewhere, but maybe these associations are the reason I feel so connected to Montana.
Part of Surviving Seattle is finding ways to spice it up, so last week I left Seattle and drove East chasing snow. Three years in Vietnam had severely impacted my ski program and I was determined not to let another year go by without getting back on ‘em. I missed it and I’m spoiled. After almost thirty years in Ketchum/Sun Valley and Salt Lake City I like fresh powder and Seattle is not the place to find it.
I wrote this in 2011 but recent events have reminded me of its timeliness.
Sometimes I think I’m dreaming… And, sometimes I imagine the nightmare on the flipside of my dream. In the dream I am a child of privilege – born healthy, of middle class white parents, in the middle of the 20th century in America. It’s all about timing and location. Too young to know the deprivation of the Great Depression. Too young to fight in WWII and Korea. Military service before Vietnam. Too old for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two public universities while they were still free, and now receiving full Social Security and Medicare just as it was promised. I can’t imagine a better dream but it’s not a dream – it’s my reality.
Let me go on the record – I thought Zero Dark Thirty was a great film. It doesn’t purport to be a documentary but it does claim fidelity to actual events surrounding the hunt for and eventual killing of Osama Bin Laden. Kathryn Bigelow, the director, was passed over by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in the 2013 run for the Best Director Oscar, and word on the street is that the opening scenes of “enhanced interrogation” and “extreme rendition” are behind the Academy’s snub.
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