Beasts and Biophiles

A while back there was this sailing trip on a square-rigged ship in the North Pacific. On that trip we were to look for, try to quantify and come up with solutions for the huge amount of plastic garbage floating in the ocean. Among the crew was a young woman whom we often saw sitting alone sketching in an artist's pad. After the trip she put together a show of her artwork, some obviously drawn from that sketch pad. and others accomplished after she returned. With her work she organized a show at the university she attends. Her work in multi media is intriguing, original, amazing, and yes, if garbage can hold beauty, beautiful.

Take a look at her presentation titled Kaisei Art Show.

Drive-bys

Is there anything better in the world than drive-by turkey dressing? Every year I find this one little thing to be thankful for, even though it sometimes takes an extended search. Four stores this year until I found the Pepperidge Farm mix I like. It took that many to find a turkey small enough as well, but the Pepperidge Farm is the real prize. So, now there is a huge bowl of dressing sitting like a target in the refrigerator. The drive-by reference? Who can walk past a fridge with a bowl of stuffing in it without reaching in for a handful. Drive-by stuffing. Really.

Rain? Really?

Some days just aren’t fair. I mean, you live in Alaska and you can expect certain things from the weather. Mostly it won’t get too hot in the summer. It will rain on and off from mid July until September and in winter it is cold and there’s snow. Given.

So today we had icy rain. All the way from the south coast to the Arctic coast. Roads so icy they were barely passable. The first 10 miles of the commute were ice shoulder to shoulder on the road and no treatment whatsoever, not even a little gravel spread on the curves or hills. It was 20 mph the whole way. I followed a school bus with chains and they chewed up a little track that I kept one wheel in, The highway was a little better but never got over 45. Schools closed around me and should have been closed in Anchorage.

Fairbanks was just about immobilized and even Barrow the northernmost city in North America got icy rain. A meteorologist in Fairbanks said something like this only happened twice in the last 100 years.

Coming home was worse. An hour and a half to do a trip that normally takes about 40 minutes. Worst again was the blue highway to the house. Ten miles of sheet ice and no school bus. I stopped once I got on it to clean the headlights but even pulled off the road it was so slick I could barely stand up. Thought better of it and drove on with dirty headlights. On the way out this afternoon I passed some folks who were going the other way. A truck was hooked up to a small car and it looked like the car couldn’t make an icy hill and the truck was going to pull it up. I remembered that on the way home and got a little way on at the two hills I have to climb. First one went fine, but the second one was longer. 

I love the seven gears the paddle shifters offer for the control they afford, but even so I barely made it. There’s a good straight stretch before it but every time I got up to about fifth gear, the wheels started slipping and climbing toward the ditch. Barely made it to the top as I held onto each gear as long as I could, knowing each lower gear added that much more torque to make the wheels spin. Even so I topped it in second gear, barely, and then still slipped and slid the next five miles before I got off on a side road. Snow I can deal with but rain? Really? What’s fair about that? Supposed to be same tomorrow. Happy Thanksgiving, indeed.

Glasnost

Looking over the Beatles explosion on iTunes today. Just the names of all the songs bring back so many memories. If life were a musical the background in mine easily could have been the Beatles catelog. There are many stories associated with many songs, but one jumped off the page today.

It would have had to have been in the late 80s during the time of Gorbachev. As relations between our two countries were warming, in a cultural exchange between the United States and the U.S.S.R., a group of folks from Siberia, mostly involved in culture, came to Alaska for a week.

Several musical groups were involved. I went to one concert billed as a folk exchange. It was quite an event at the Performing Arts Center in Anchorage. Among the Russian acts coming was their most famous rock group Stas Namin. The folk event was advertised specifically saying the rockers would perform in their own concert, but would not be at the folk concert.

We sat through several performances, that were meant to showcase various types of music in each country. A Baptist church choir, a group of peasant folk singers who traveled their country gathering and recording the music, as much a research project as it was performance art. A Yup’ik Eskimo dance group from Bethel, Alaska, and another Eskimo group from Siberia. I recall noticing this young performer with the Bethel group who stood out, given the background of hoping young people learn and preserve their culture. He was very animated and obviously, not only good at it, but enjoying it.

Throughout the concert, there was a rock band setup in the background, drums and other equipment, but no one ever went near it.

The whole event raised many emotions in the audience, at least it did in me. We had grown up fearing that country, fearing a nuclear World War III; we built bomb shelters and even the interstate highway system fearing these people; we had endured the Cuban missile crisis right at the brink, and yet here they were on our stage with our performers and they were just people, just like us. I remember hoping people were feeling what I was feeling about seeing this fear come to an end. I had felt silly enough hiding under a school desk in an atomic bomb drill, and felt even sillier thinking about the futility of that maneuver now.

The concert reached the end of the scheduled performances in the program and then the master of ceremonies came out and said something about we didn’t want to announce this but here they are: “Stas Namin.”

The Soviet rockers ran out onto the stage and picked up their instruments from that setuup in the back and then roared into some heavy rock and roll. As I think back on it now, I only remember one song. The rest of what they played was I think a mix of a couple of their songs in Russian and some familiar Western songs.

The song I remember came up this way: After Stas Namin had played a short set, the leader, whom I later found out is named Stas Namin, spoke in halting English about a young man from America who had impressed the group while they were in Alaska.

Then he called up that kid from Bethel and handed him a microphone. The band immediately played the oh, so familiar first notes of a Beatles song that brought a roar from the crowd, Mind you, this was mostly an older crowd, many of whom had grown up with the Beatles.

Out of the introductory notes, the Yup’ik Eskimo boy from Bethel, Alaska, fronting for the greatest Soviet rock band from deep in Russia, broke into the first phrases of the Beatles’ “Back in the U.S.S.R.” The audience immediately came to its collective feet. The woman on my left grabbed my hand and I grabbed the one to my right. This was happening all over the auditorium. Where you could see, there were huge smiles on faces and here and there a tear on a cheek. What rushed through my mind was all that time wasted and how politicians sometimes get locked into things that we common folk could solve in a moment. The kid from Bethel belted out that song with the Soviet rockers, singing the song like he had done it all his life, the audience swaying to the beat. When they finished, they had left the audience exhausted, there was silence for a moment while we all tried to process what we had just seen, and then this huge roar of applause built gradually from us. I noticed leaving the show how many people were quiet, lost in some thoughts of their own, perhaps like mine.

It was something you wished John Lennon could have seen.

Take a sad song and make it better

A few months ago after I had written about Lady Gaga a couple of times, a very young friend of mine commented something like: “That’s great. You’re keeping up.” (Insinuating “at YOUR age”)

That didn’t sound right, but I didn’t have a defense at the time. Now I realize it was simply the latest manifestation of a lifelong curiosity. I had heard of her and an opportunity came up to learn more about her and her music and I took it. I liked what I learned and the rest is history. I have never in my life felt like I had to keep up. As a matter of fact I have more often thought people had to keep up with me. After all I am probably the oldest Lil Monster in the world.

So, now curiosity has gotten the better of me again. Last winter I had thought, given the amount of time I spend alone in this house it might be fun to have one of the video game systems. They turned out to cost much more than I felt comfortable spending so I let it drop. Then a couple of weeks ago I was looking at my rewards points for a credit card and discovered I was about to see 6,000 points expire. I raced through the offerings until I came to something very close to the number of points I had. In a flash without thinking I had ordered an Xbox 360. It’s even new enough to be able to use the new Kinect image gaming hardware.

It was then I realized I haven’t been successful on a video game since beating the game Jaws on the original Nintendo in the early 80s. Since then as I’ve watched my kids play and tried it a time or two it has been one 15-minute exercise in frustration after another. Once I had the unit, I went looking for a game. All I want is a simple car racing game. When I asked the cute girl with the nose jewel which one would be a simple racing game she looked at me like I was way out of my league (I was) and said there are no simple Xbox games. I bought Grand Theft Auto IV mostly because I recognized the name and I thought at least I could create some mayhem. I should have saved my money.

That was yesterday. Today I woke up remembering what I wanted to get last year when I was looking: one of the Rock Band games, particularly the Beatles. So today I went looking. A Walmart, a Fred Meyer, a Target. No one had it. But, the guy at Target said try Game Stop over there.

So off I went. Another one of those almost goth girls... neat clean, not overly made up, but the nose stud, the dark makeup and the oh so cute eyes and tight striped top. I hated to bring up the Beatles with her. It took two or three tries but a guy in the store finally came up with the whole Beatles Rock Band package: guitar, drums, microphone (I won’t be using that) and of course the game. 

Now also instead of rap and a game I can’t seem to play, I get good music and a game I am pretty sure I can play. (A couple of years ago I played it for a few minutes with my son and his friend and at the easiest level I could almost keep up.) Plus, this purchase held a couple of bonuses: first it was less than half the price I would have paid for the same thing last year, and, second I bought it from a local store rather than one of those big boxes that ruin local entrepreneurs. And on top of that there was the beautiful smile from the almost goth girl which I chose to interpret as "you're cool" rather than "I have to smile at this old guy trying to be young."

But the best part was yet to come. I had quite a hike across the parking lot to my car given that I had parked in front of Target (Jeep, but that’s another story from today). In the lot I was accosted by a woman who is probably close to my age. She had one of those happy, loud, kind of blousy voices and saw me and my Beatles box and said wow, that is so cool, Where did you find it. I told her and that it was half the original price. That is so great she said, Then she asked, looking me over, is that for you or is it a gift. Rather embarrassed I said in a low voice, it’s for me. She laughed. OH man, you rock. You go have good time. Rock on! I promised to do that, now somehow more confident with my purchase.

What I should have done was invite her to come along. Wondering now if there is a Leon Russell Rock Band game or OOOO, Ra Ra a a a-a-a Lady Gaga.

ADDENDUM: OK, that was officially fun. Took a while to get things to work but once I got the guitar going, well, lost in it for an hour. I even had to sing one song. Best not do that again. But this will be fun.

What democracy has come to

There's a talk radio mouth in Anchorage who was encouraging people to register as write-in candidates in order to confuse voters who asked for a list of them at the polls. This was to subvert the votes for one write-in candidate for the U.S. Senate. If memory serves the list now has about 180 names on it and runs 6 or 8 pages. He even offered a special prize if anyone signed up with a name similar enough to the candidate's to be confusing and perhaps corrupt legitimate votes. The Governor Interrupted called it good satire. A partial transcript of the radio show was published last night. Here is a quote from it:

Dan: I'm only tampering with the election so the right candidate
wins ... I'm only trying to trick voters so the right candidate gets
the victory.

A link to the whole story.

Yet, despite that, there is sanity in the world

To counter the previous post, here is a link to a gallery of signs waved at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Saturday in Washington, D.C. It reconfirms we are still out there only times have changed and now, perhaps WE are the silent majority. Have fun with these.

Party signs.

Conversations with Patricia: Day before the election (with apologies)

Please don't fret. Silence doesn't mean disapproval. Silence only means I am holding off for the perfect moment to give your story a good, thoughtful read, rather than rush through it when my mind is somewhere else. I can't believe how much the thought of Joe Miller being our US Senator depresses me.

You mind reader you. I’m already planning to get drunk tomorrow night. I don't see good ahead. Who's Hitler? Now that would be Glenn Beck, not O'Bama...xx PM

If you want to see Hitler: There is an ad on TV here by one of Miller's rivals. It is done in black and white and the message is "Do you know who Joe Miller is?" What is shown in black and white is a parade I think in Wasilla. First you see a huge black Hummer with American flags on it and two sullen rough looking people inside it. It has Joe Miller signs stuck to it. It passes and is followed by people carrying Miller signs and marching mostly in white shirts and black pants and carrying assault rifles and shoulder and hip holsters with handguns and a couple with big knives strapped to their legs. It is striking.

OMG When my friend Fiona was visiting from Ireland, she kept wanting to see a Hummer. We would drive around and she'd say, "there's one!" and it would be an SUV (still huge by Irish standards). When she finally saw one she was struck dumb, rare for an Irish person. Then she said, "wow. A pleasure tank.” I have always thought that the perfect description.

Now, hitting those keys...xx PM

PS You working tomorrow night? Or will you be joining me by drinking in front of the tellly? Or...out and about? Something I really miss about Alaska is the parties on election night, although I would think they are more hostile than in the past.

pleasure tank is a good description. I work tomorrow night though I am not enthused. Every poll here has a different result, it is that close.... and these pollsters are the same ones who had Murkowski winning the primary by a landslide

so it goes

Just be careful, remember Edgar Allen Poe being found dead drunk in a gutter on election night in Baltimore.

Somehow I had forgotten it was an election night. I knew I liked that fella.

the theory was someone got him drunk and dragged him around town to vote in several places. I feel like we ought to do that with a few people in Alaska tomorrow. I understand the bars can stay open on election day these days. I never understood that law. If there was ever a day thinking people needed to drink …

The most drunk I have been in recent history was the second stolen Bush election. I held out until Kerry conceded, way too early if you ask me. I wondered if the fix was in.

You talk about fixes. There is a big flap here over allowing election workers to hand out a list of write-in candidates at the polls. Two courts have ruled it is all right to do that. One of those right wing radio mouths here urged people to hurry and sign up as write-in candidates so the list would be confusing to people wanting to write in Lisa Murkowski. He even offered a special prize to anyone whose name looked enough like hers to be even more confusing. That is so outrageous on so many levels. And, I think it may be illegal. I hope he gets charged with attepting to corrupt an election. And, I don't even like Murkowski.

Murk. Murk is the relevant term here.

I feel old. I feel very very cynical. It's hard for me to imagine that people really want to vote for people as STUPID as Michelle Bachner. But then, I am constantly surprised at my students too. One student in my Senior Seminar on ecology of personal life made a contribution (his first in almost ten weeks) to the group report that he's supposed to be working on, studying the environmental impact of food waste. He posted three websites devoted to using food dyes on clothing. ??????? He's also the one who wanted, as his final project for the class, to buy and flip a house. I don't even know where to begin. xx PM

You went straight into the direction my mind was going. I have been thinking about this for a while. As I watched my kids progress through the schools it always bothered me that they were aimed for the lowest common denominator. In other words, the class only went as fast as its slowest member and the really bright kids had to rise above the system in order to thrive. not an easy thing to do in a world of peer pressure, electronics, drugs and so many other temptations and discouragements. Of course you are closer to the results of the school system than I am and probably see the result more clearly. What I have been thinking is this is what we get, a world where intellect is considered a drawback, where education is ridiculed and where being common is revered. Where someone like Sarah Palin calls global warming “snake oil science” and is cheered for it, where Barack Obama is criticized for his Harvard education and on and on. So instead we get gun toting right wing ignoramuses raising ignorance to worshipful levels. Could these be the Huns, Vandals, Goths and Visigoths and we are again entering a Dark Age?

My new approach has been to aim discussions at the better students. This has made the better students incredibly happy, and the ones who diligently refuse to do the classwork extremely angry. They are used to "respect," which means getting away with murder. Funny to find myself sounding like a right-wing advocate of elitism in my old age..xx PM

I remember when you earned respect rather than demanded it. ah, but how the world turns, elitism is the new left wing

The Mudflats