Tuesday, November 16, 2010

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.

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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

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“My children will likely turn my picture to the wall but what the hell, you only get old once." — Joe May

“Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” — Ernest Hemingway

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth. Kurt Vonnegut

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The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

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“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

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Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

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It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

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Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

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Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

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