Ahoy!

An Uncomfortable Art The hypnotic music from my DC days — my 20s / the ‘80s — drew me across the expanse of galleries at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA): Bronski Beat’s “Small Town Boy” — a melancholic anthem for a generation of young gay men seeking love amid the loneliness of AIDS in that dark ruin of a Reaganesque era.  I walked closer until a red curtain warning of “graphic content” stopped me from instant entry. Once behind the curtain, a wizard of MoCA’s permanent collection confronted me: the 42-minute-long photo-with-music montage that is Nan Goldin’s “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” (1983 - 2008). I stayed for every minute — for every often disturbingly yet always intimate image. I kept wondering — how did she get these images, these brutally honest, often ugly but somehow hypnotically beautiful snapshots of gritty humanity? The soundtrack rolled on and I was left strangely moved. In another gallery, an even more unsettling  display: “Chromatic ...

“We must flee, as we are now in the clutches of a wolf,” said then Cardinal Giovanni di Medici in 1492 upon the election of the notorious Rodrigo Borgia as Pope Alexander VI. As this was a period during which papal enemies often took unexpectedly ultimate swims in the Tiber (including Borgia’s own son some years later) flee Medici did, eventually to return and become a rather wolfish pope himself, Leo X. Since November 9, 2016,  I have often recalled that quote: obvious to me — and I believe, to most thinking, humanist people — that Trump was a singularly dangerous wolf. Like a feral canine, he lives only to eat, kill, mate and survive. And like a lupine predator, DJT leads a pack of lesser, subservient wolves. Unfortunately for the United States — and the world — many voters (for and against) saw in Trump an aging dog in sheep-killer clothing: all bark and no bite.   Alas, after almost a year-and-a-half since 11/9, Trump has proven (as if anyone who had followed his...

Happy Birthday Grandma (The Tradition of the Calendar Towel) by David Perry, written at sea aboard "Crystal Symphony" March 31, 1998 A century ago today, near a small farming town called Sontag, in Franklin Country, Virginia, in a farmhouse room lit by kerosene lamps and warmed with generations, an amazing woman was born: My grandmother. 1898. How that year always fascinated me. I would ask again, and again "Grandma, what year were you born?" She would take the pins from her mouth - held there while she sewed on some dress, shirt, pants or blouse for a family member, friend, or client - and tell me. "1898." Exotic it always seemed to me, this loving, living link to another century. Every Christmas morning the entire clan could gather at Grandma Hoard's or "Aunt Mildred's" as she was known to my cousins. There, I would sit at her feet - proudly guarding the tree - and hand out the various presents that cousins and aun...

January 22, 2018 By this point in the calendar, the Holidays have faded from the rear-view mirror of memory. The first three-day weekend of the year has paid tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and given everyone a brief “whew”: an extra day to digest the reality of 2018.   By now, meetings are being set for the months ahead, and ads for Memorial Day will soon start appearing. We are solidly in the midst of an annus novus.  We humans need time to let reality sink in. The reality of 2018 took three weeks to settle over me – in part due to a nasty flu which descended upon my body and my sinuses on new year’s eve. The reality of Donald Trump: that has taken a year. This morning as I awoke with the dawn, for the first time in weeks, my flu seemed to be in retreat. The reality of Donald Trump: not so much. In the previous year, there has been much made about “normalizing” Donald Trump,   as if somehow accepting the reality of his existence is to make him normal. I ...

The Day After November 8, 2017 By David Perry, A year ago, I went to bed assured that I would awake to a Democratic President: a woman, a progressive – not him. I was wrong. I was complacent. We all were. The NY Times (complete with graphics)   told us that “Hillary Clinton has a 90% chance of winning the Presidency!” That wasn’t helpful. Trump won, and for the last year, sales of antacid tablets soared (as did bar tabs) and many a TV bore the brunt of heel marks from shoes thrown at screens every time “he” appeared. Of course, “he” appeared A LOT. Escaping “him” was impossible. Until last night. A year ago, I went to bed cocky, spoiled, entitled, gay-and-legally-married and feeling a bit superior: A Black president, now a woman! Soon, aliens from another planet will come and welcome us into the great kumbaya of extraterrestrial togetherness! I was wrong. Here on earth, the “elites” and the know-it-all-know-nothings lost to the “just say nos” of the last eig...

A Summer Without Trump (kinda) by David Perry Well….he’s still here. When my husband and I left the United States in late June for a summer working abroad, I made myself a promise:  NO TRUMP.  Eschewing all social media and reading only non-American news, I had hoped to gain not only a greater insight into my own country, but also to hear how Europeans felt about the United States and its new president.  It worked – for a while. It worked – until Charlottesville. As a native Virginian, for me the weekend of August 11, 2017 was a Trump too far.  For four days, I fell into the rancid rabbit hole of news from that hideous event: Nazis, KKK, an innocent young woman mowed down by a car, the President of the United States equating proactive racism with reactive protest. I wrote an editorial. It was published several places.  Ditto for hundreds, if not thousands – millions of others – around the globe, crying out in Facebooked outrage and Twittered angst over th...