CURRENT MISSION

To know and appreciate the world without too much prejudgment

ABOUT ME

Frequent traveler (have been in about 85 countries, including five continents in 2006, seven countries in seven weeks in 2006, and four continents in four weeks in 2006); would love to commute from Indonesia to Italy with stop-overs in Hawaii, Los Angeles, and Santa Fe; feel it's important to be a good friend through loyalty and objective counsel

See my facebook profile at "B. W. Grant Barnes," in Los Angeles

PHILOSOPHY

To live lightly on the face of the earth but as deeply in the hearts of other people and they do in me

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Legal Adviser to Glendale Philharmonic; much pro bono legal counsel to non-profit organizations and performing artists, especially musicians and actors

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Was for thirty years host/traveler with U.S. Servas but travel with CS exclusively now because of the growing dysfunction of that group and the success of CS; have frequent guests in my apartment from CS, FaceBook, and other acquaintances

Interests

Social justice initiatives; opera, symphonic and chamber music; social and moral philosophy; rowing (lapsed); sculling; skydiving (lapsed); hula dancing (lapsed); scuba; lyric poetry; independent theater, especially acting and directing; admire almost everything by Peter Sellars, Robert Wilson, Gulu Monteiro, Philip Littell, Ken Roht, and Peter Stein; have created opera libretti based on Plato's "Phaedrus", the life of San Juan de la Cruz, Camus's "La Peste", and Hesse's "Narziss und Goldmund"
Collect artists like Sam Scott and Michael Newberry; favorite singers include sopranos Cecilia Bartoli, Renee Fleming, Karita Mattila, and Jessica Rivera; mezzos Susan Graham. Mitsuko Shirai, and Perla Batalla; tenors Timur Bekbosunov, Kurt Streit, Rolando Villazon, Placido Domingo and Anthony Dean Griffey, Michael Bragg, Nicholas Phan, Kalil Wilson; baritones Gerald Finley, Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Teddy Tahu Rhodes, Justin Lee Miller, Anthony Mankins; basses Feruccio Furlanetto and Rene Pape; favorite instrumentals include organist Cameron Carpenter; cellists Ruslan Biryakov, Peter Wispelwey, Carter Brey, Alban Gerhardt, Lars Hoefs and Maksim Velichkin; pianists Danny Holt, Marino Formenti, Andras Schiff, Martha Argerich, Alfred Brendel, Piotr Anderszewski, Mitsuko Uchida and Pierre-Laurent Aimard; string quartets like the Calder, the Lyris, the Emerson, the St. Lawrence, and the Juilliard; piano trios like the Trio de Parma and Beaux Arts Trio; orchestras like the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the Concertgebouw Orchestra

• arts
• writing
• poetry
• theater
• architecture
• acting
• dancing
• walking
• traveling
• music
• piano
• opera
• scuba diving
• skydiving
• rowing
• law
• tours

Music, Movies, and Books

Music: Mozart piano concertos and sonatas; Beethoven, Haydn and Shostakovich string quartets; Balinese and Javanese gamelan music; most works by John Adams and Jake Heggie; Richard Strauss' "Ariadne" and "Rosenkavalier"; Richard Wagner's "Tristan" and "Meistersinger"; Monteverdi's "L'Incoronazione di Poppea"; Britten's "Death in Venice" and "War Requiem"; Verdi's "Don Carlo" and "Falstaff"; Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio; Rachmaninoff's Cello/Piano sonata; Bach's cello suites; Perla Batalla; Leonard Cohen; the late Fecundo Cabral; Eliot Douglass; Joao Manuel Serrat; Madredeus

Movies: Anything by Renoir, especially "Rules of the Game"; most anything by Wim Wenders, especially "Wings of Desire"; most anything by Ingmar Bergman, especially "Smiles of a Summer Night"; 1930's screwball comedies; "Central Station," "Leben der Anderen", "Control Room"

Books: Have taught Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Homer and the Greeks; always enjoy Plato, Kant, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and the Greek plays in general; in poetry, especially resonate with Antonio Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Emily Dickinson, Carlos Drummond de Andrade; in American literature, almost always excited by new works of Don Delillo, Tony Kushner, Nick Salamone, and non-fiction writing about places, periods and idea I don't have much awareness about before reading

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

helping to save someone's life in a fire and a year later another person who was having a heart attack, both strangers when we met at a time I'm sure we'll both remember even though we didn't exchange names

Teach, Learn, Share

Los Angeles Philharmonic and Disney Hall; independent and smaller theater in L.A. and Hawaii; chamber music, especially piano trios; world (i.e., non-Western) music and dance; writing operas; neighborhood walking tours of the Los Angeles area, especially historic and contemporary architecture and the variety of cultures represented within just a small sliver of L.A.

Countries I’ve Visited

Algeria, Argentina, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Micronesia, Federated States of, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, Netherlands Antilles, Northern Mariana Islands, Palau, Palestine, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Russian Federation, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Vatican City State, Venezuela, Virgin Islands, U.S.

Countries I’ve Lived In

Germany, Guam, Spain, Sweden, United States

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