I wonder if the human heart

I wonder if the human heart is like the weather.

Does it, in spring, blow hard by degrees,

One day hot, the next cold, damp, and grey?

Is it ever frozen by winter's sorrows, or

Cut off in its promise by a late frost or

An early storm leaving only moments;

Scrap paper and dried roses like fallen leaves?

Does it ever have the constancy of tropical summer,

Before the rain, hot and still, smothering you with

Patches of brilliantly colored air sewn into a

Crazy quilt of romance and desire, touched here

And there with thick thread of pungent fruit;

Of fish sauce and tittering laughter as we both smile

Coyly, embarrassed by our sudden shyness?

December 2011

To Luong Thi Mai Hong

Music and Miniatures

I've been involved in an online discussion lately where a group of us are trying to refight the Second World War as Japan. We represent a kinder gentler Japan. (Though one still bent on securing the resources we need for independence. And liberating East Asia from colonial oppression seems the way to go about it.) For the most part this has involved cleaning up our military, treating the locals with decency so that we can gain their support, waging a PR campaign in the United States so that the electorate there knows that we genuinely have swept away Tojo and the militaristic nationalists, and of course lots and lots of logistics. (How many c. 5" rifles can we build? How many graving docks over 600' do we have? How much steel? How much rubber? How much bauxite can we get from Indochina? How much oil from Borneo? How many additional merchant hulls will we need? How can we prevent losses? How much efficiency will we lose by instituting a convoy system? Can we afford conversions? Destroyers? Carriers? You get the idea.)

Well, in the midst of all this serious talk our esteemed Prime Minister, while talking about what to call some of our proposed special use infantry units, suggested "storm troopers" and wondered if we could get someone from Hollywood to write some theme music. Well, that was enough for the good Admiral Noka Shijin. In his academy days his friends called him "Shinfonikku Shijin." (Or Symphonic Poet if you prefer English.) So he blew the dust off some "theme music" and posted a couple of videos to YouTube featuring our fleet, and one with some trolls and goblins just for entertainment. (Should we wish to be evil and twirl our mustaches.)

Since this is falls at the very intersection of all that I try to write about here, save for the poetry, I would be quite remiss if I didn't repost it . . .

So, if you want to hear my third symphony, you can listen to the first movement on YouTube.

Since it's longer than their beblasted ten minute limit there's also a second part to said first movement.

And the mustache twirling (from a ballet I wrote for my late sister) is also available for your listening pleasure. (With orcs.)

Sincerely,

The Composer

And finally . . .

The two of us.

For everyone else who has wished us well.

And finally, a little blurry, but well . . .

Thank you all.

Narita Japan

There are two posts I should really add to make the travelog complete, but I'm going to post them in reverse order. This will be the very last thing I did. After leaving Ho Chi Minh City I had a lengthy layover in Narita Japan and decided to go exploring just a little. My primary goal was to find and explore a rather old Shigon Buddhist temple called "Naritasan Shinshoji" or "Narita Mountain New Victory Temple." This "new" temple having been founded in 940, apparently, and being one of the oldest in the Kanto region. (Thank you Wikipedia.)

So I took a train into town, bought some breakfast at a lovely little cafe, and commenced wandering around. When that failed to net me an old temple, I went back to the train station and got a map. Worked much better.

It was in an older picturesque part of town with lovely narrow streets and lots of traditional buildings (and plenty of police peep cams.)



A twenty minute stroll brought me to the temple where I spent the next hour or so wandering around and listening to a very neat religious service of some kind. (Much fire, chanting, and drumming. And lots of people in formal Japanese clerical garb of one kind or another and, thankfully, even more ordinary folks just going to temple for their own reasons so it didn't feel so touristy. Pretty normal assortment of people in their "Sunday" best. Much like a typical church in the west, but without the shoes and with more percussion.)

The music was splendid. The body of it was microtonal chanting that didn't change pitch much, but was sort of rhythmically fascinating. And the slow rise and fall was really neat. Behind this was some very driving periodic drumming that gradually increased in tempo, with a few different types of bells dropped in from time to time for emphasis.

Next to the temple was a Japanese garden that reminded me of home, oddly. (The city of my youth is home to a rather large and well regarded Japanese garden called "Seiwa En" or "Garden of Pure Clear Harmony and Peace.") Obviously the garden's (Japanese) creators got it right, as the version in Narita was clearly quite similar.

Behind this was a cemetery where I got myself briefly lost: an experience I recommend, so long as you're not in a hurry to catch a flight. (I wasn't, thankfully. It was all quite a good thing.)







Of course, all of this will no doubt bear periodic repeating as time goes forward. I suspect I will be making annual or semi-annual pilgrimages to Ho Chi Minh for Tet, so it should be quite possible to stop through Japan from time to time on the way there or the way back.

Ho Chi Minh City

The city once known as Saigon is a strange and interesting place. Contrary to my first impression there are traffic signals and police officers, but in spite of all that, one's first impression of HCM is probably almost inevitably the traffic. There are something over eight million people here and every single one of them seems to own a motorcycle. Further, there doesn't really seem to be much in the way of segregation by function. Businesses, factories, and homes exist side by side in an uninterrupted cloth.

The block I'm on has perhaps a half dozen restaurants, two mobile phone shops, a couple of pharmacies, a small factory of some kind, and an admixture of other things I can't immediately identify but which clearly look business like. And of course people eat and sleep in virtually every one of these buildings in back rooms and on upper floors. There are surprisingly few "stand alone" houses here, even by European standards. And virtually nothing actually "stands alone." Streets are fronted with continuous walls of buildings to the sidewalk line and beyond on all sides. Alleys are distinct from streets only by breadth and lack of sidewalks. And everything is filled with the noise of people and traffic and the smells of food are everywhere at all times. Makes any city in the west seem downright quiet and sleepy. (Up to and including New York.)

Anyway . . . I can't really convey the whole thing, but here's a little. First, a relatively typical Ho Chi Minh building:



Christmas is apparently celebrated here, and it feels . . . strange. Here's a shop selling little santa suits in all sizes:



A little piece of the local telecom infrastructure:



This is about how a typical street feels:



As you get into the older part of town, district one, there are a number of older and larger buildings and even some colonial remnants that have been converted into museums of one kind or another:



No trip to the east would be complete without a visit to a local temple of some kind. I tossed a few bucks into the collection box in gratitude for letting me take pictures. This one is a fairly typical Buddhist example:





Of course, Saigon was and still is a port city. You can see everything from sampans loaded down with rice on the rivers to cruise ships anchored downtown. The little tour boat went zipping by while we visited one of the museums:



Here's a little glimpse of the skyline, which isn't tall yet, but it's growing:



There's lots more I could show you, of course, and in a week I've only scratched the surface, but I hope this taste meets your approval. I'll close with this shot of a back alley near the main market that's become a motorcycle parking lot:

Well, 'tis my last day in Vietnam. All has gone quite well. I've survived noise and traffic and crazy food, and even East Asian dating rituals, I think. I figured out how to pull pictures on here a few days ago (with the aid of a recently purchased device) but haven't had the time since. Today, being a comparatively quiet day, I have the time.



So here's Mai Hong and I in the hotel room shortly after I got to Ho Chi Minh City:



Her brother in law Hung runs this little cell phone shop:

Her parents live in a smaller city called Cai Lay, and her father raises chickens and ducks:



Her older sister lives in a city famous for its beaches. She brought down some fresh crabs. (You can drag any kind of food, living or dead, more or less anywhere but the western chain coffee joint.) These apparently came down with her on the train and then took the bus with us later before eventually winding up as dessert.



Here we are having dinner. From right to left: the composer, Mai Hong, her younger sister Mai Tham, her mother, and her father:



The next day her sisters fetted me with a birthday party Vietnam style:



The young one is called something along the lines of "bean" and belongs with Mai Hong's older sister.

Will add some pictures about HCM City itself in a second post, but I'll cut the first one here to keep it from getting unwieldy.

More on Vietnam

Well, there are traffic lights in Saigon after all. Went for a lengthy drive about town yesterday, or ride, I should say, as I was perched atop the back of Mai Hong's sister's scooter. I got to be her bitch! :D

If you hadn't gathered this from the last post, scooters are the preferred mode of transportation in Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City. In a city of 8 million people squeezed into an area the size of . . . oh, who knows, but a small area, anyway . . . Central Park? . . . (Not quite that small) but in such a small dense area it only makes sense. New York could learn a thing or two. Traffic would flow a lot better indeed in Manhattan if the car/motorcycle ratio were similar. And if there were so few traffic lights. Yeah, you'd have to make the speed limit maybe 20 mph, but that's what . . . ten times as fast as a crosstown bus right now?

Anyway . . . there are traffic lights. And above each one there's a little clock that gives you the time to the next change. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines.

So I got to meet Mai Hong's younger sister Mai Tham and her husband Hung yesterday. And his nephew Khanh. Today I met her older sister Mai Hoa and her son. Cute kid, but got terrible motion sickness on the bus. Need to suggest the trail mix treatment. I seem to recall that helped my ex a great deal. The bus, you see, brought us to a smaller city called Cai Lay where Mai Hong's parents live. So now I've also met her mother, father, and paternal grandmother. All these things I've seen only in her pictures. Good times.

And tonight we will feast upon fresh crab. (You have to step over them to get to the facilities.) Things are different in different countries, you see. And in VN the crabs stay as guests in your kitchen before you invite them to be the main course. (A swan gets to sing a lovely song about that phenomenon in Orf's Carmina Burana. "I used to be white and lovely, and now I'm extra crispy."

Had a duck egg last night. And inside the egg, of course, was a duck embryo. Tasted much like very very tender chicken. You just eat the sucker whole. (Or you eat all of it anyway, one little piece at a time.) The albumen is QUITE a lot harder than that in unfertalized chicken eggs. It's as though the liquid parts of the egg become quite solid, but the "solid" parts become very very soft. Not bad, all told, if you can get past any initial reaction you might have.

Which is to say Vietnam is, first and foremost, a blooming food adventure. Well, second and secondmost. First it's a way to meet Mai Hong. Second it's food.

More later.