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Donald's Blog
April 30, 2015 Getting old 1 I've got a Colorado driver's license. They made me take my glasses off for the picture -- they don't even do that for a passport photo -- and I look like I've got one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. I went to a dermatologist and he told me that my skin doesn't like the sun, and prescribed a tube of ointment. (I paid $10 for it because I have insurance; the retail price is supposed to be $300. Smells like a scam to me.) So I've been putting this stuff on my old map twice a day for ten days and now I look like an extra from The Living Dead. I'm telling everybody that I saw an ad in the back of a comic book that said "Look 30 years younger in two weeks!" April 30, 2015 Getting old 2 As soon as we signed up for Medicare last December we found out why you have to have supplemental insurance when Ethne went to get her prescriptions filled: Walgreen's wanted several hundred bucks. Johnny Sobott in Denver told me that he and Dottie had been with Kaiser Permanente for years and liked it, but meanwhile we'd signed up with Humana. They immediately told me that I would be penalised $10 a month for some reason; I talked to them on the phone and didn't like the response I was getting, so we switched ro Kaiser after all. Then it turned out that the problem is with Medicare, not the supplemental insurance. There's some bureaucrat somewhere who can't read. When we went to the Social Security Administration's office in Colorado Springs on December 12, Ethne started taking her social security and we both enrolled in Medicare. We brought with us a document for each of us from each of four different employers (a total of eight documents) proving that we had both had "creditable coverage" since long before either of us was eligible for any bennies, and the Social Security office saw no problem. (Some of the dopes who work in departments of human resources at the various employers don't know what they're doing, so acquiring this set of documents required quite a bit of correspondence and a few phone calls.) So why is Medicare telling Humana and now Kaiser that I did not have "creditable coverage"? And since we've both had exactly the same coverage since 1998, why should I be penalised and not Ethne? The correspondence continues. Meanwhile, a week or two before the medical coverage from Ethne's last employer ran out at the end of January, she found a lady doctor she liked. So I tried to go to her in February, and they would not accept me because I was on Medicare. I could probably go to Ethne's doctor now that we have supplemental insurance, but I wouldn't want to. I've got hooked up with Peak Vista, who have made an industry out of looking after poor people and old poops like me. The waiting room looks like Doctors Without Borders, my nurse practitioner, Janey Switzer, is a jolly gal who knows her stuff, and I'm very happy. I had no trouble getting a referral to a dermatologist (I wanted to go to one in Pennsylvania but I would have had to wait months, so I gave up in disgust), and I've had my blood tested two years after my surgery, and my PSA is still zero. So I'm in good shape for an old fella. April 30, 2015 Alma Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel (1879-1964) is perhaps most famous because Tom Lehrer wrote a song about her, though she was something of a New York celebrity in the early 1960s, appearing at least twice on the Jack Paar show. She was the lover and/or wife of some of the century's greatest artists, including composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, painter and playwright Oscar Kokoschka, architect Walter Gropius, and novelist and playwright Franz Werfel. Malevolent Muse: The Life of Alma Mahler, by Oliver Hilmes, will be published in English in a week or so. It was a best-seller in Germany, the first biography of her, using a trove of previously unpublished material, and promises to give us a life and times, putting her in her context of fin de siècle Vienna. She has always been controversial: was she an egoist, a harlot, a groupie, an unreliable memoirist? Was she both malevolent and a muse? All these men certainly loved her. Werfel's best-known novel was The Song Of Bernadette, because it was made into a movie, but his most important work is The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, a novel based on the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks in 1915, republished in English a couple of years ago. Alma refused to marry him for some years, but meanwhile she encouraged and helped him in his career; she travelled with him when he was researching that book, and she helped him to become a successful playwright as well as a novelist. Sooo...What about Alma? She was beautiful and sexy, or so the men thought; she was bright, and she was an artist. She was a composer until Mahler told her to stop, saying that there was only room for one composer in the family. And I am reading Melvin Konner's Women After All, which I wrote about here recently, in which the professor of anthropology postulates that in all the ways that matter, women are superior to men, and that male supremacy is coming to an end. He writes in his introduction,
Yes, we need a good book about Alma. I'm looking forward to it. April 30, 2015 Music in the Springs
Our social and musical life has improved immensely in our new surroundings. On Sunday afternoon ten days ago I attended a concert by the Colorado Springs Philharmonic, conducted by its music director Josep Caballé-Domenich. The guest soloist was Johannes Moser on the cello, and my companion was Carlton Gamer, Emeritus Professor of Music at Colorado College. Ethne was out of town, which was a shame because she adores the cello; Elaine Freed, Carlton's special friend, author of excellent books about natural preservation, was also away. The first half of the program consisted of the slow movement from Tchaikovsky's first string quartet, the famous Andante cantabile, arranged for cello and string orchestra, and his Rococo Variations for cello and orchestra. They were played very well, very smoothly; parts of the Rococo Variations are light-hearted, and Moser used some body language with a straight face which the audience found amusing. At the interval, Carlton told me why he thought Moser really was very good: not only is his cello a fine instrument, but he gets a beautiful tone from it on every part of his bow, from one end to the other, and his pianissimos were special: very soft yet you could hear them in the back row. I could tell he was good, but it was nice to have someone so knowledgeable to tell me why I liked it. After the interval came Brahms' first symphony, one of my favorite pieces since I was a kid. I had been looking forward to hearing it live since we arrived here in October, when I first saw the orchestra's schedule. I own at least 20 different recordings of the piece. Unfortunately, in the event on Sunday afternoon I was disappointed. The music was jerked around like taffy, transitional passages quietened and slowed so that the conductor could make a splash when the big noise came back. Carlton was too diplomatic to say whether he agreed with me, but he adores Brahms; we went to Shuga's for a bite to eat after the concert, and he talked about how good Brahms is at his transitional passages: when he wants to bring back an idea, he can sneak it in any number of ways, so that even if you are half waiting for it, you don't know where it's going to come from. Exactly why the symphonies should not be played like carnival music, it seems to me. There had been a tremolo passage in the violins in the first movement that I could not hear very well, because the hall is designed to be a multi-purpose hall, not particularly good for anything, whereas, we agreed, Orchestra Hall in Chicago is perfect for a symphony ortchestra, but no good for chamber music. Anyway, it was a splendid afternoon of musical fellowship. Then night after last we went to Packard Hall to hear Colorado College's Grace Smith at the piano with the excellent Bion Tsang (from UT Austin) on cello. We sat almost in the front row, and Carlton and Elaine were right behind us. Bion Tsang led off with a Bach cello suite (BWV 1009); then they played a Boccherini sonata, a delightful set by Manuel de Falla called Suite Populaire Espagnole, and, after the interval, Beethoven's cello sonata Op. 69. 'Estrellita', by the Mexican composer Manuel Maria Ponce, was a lovely encore. Ethne was beside herself with pleasure at the cello playing practically in our laps; we were fascinated by Tsang's left hand: I would rather be able to do that than climb the highest mountain. And tonight we go to hear a potpourri of fandangos and klezmer at the Mezzanine, a venue where you can eat and drink; there will be clarinettists, and Ofer Ben-Amots, who succeeded Carlton as chairman of the music department, will play piano. And on Sunday afternoon May 3 there will be a program of dance music (de Falla, Kodaly and I don't know what all) by the Chamber Orchestra of Colorado Springs, followed by a sort of open house in Drakestone Drive, our first. The good times are here at last, not before time. April 30, 2015 Our new abode
Landscaping has begun at our mid-century moderne in Colorado Springs (prounded mow-dairne, I guess). There's a stack of firewood on the lawn that I have to saw up.
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