Anchorage To Seattle Day 3[4]: Cassiar Highway - Boya Lake to Yellowhead Highway

[Update:  Whoops, I lost a day there.  This is really Day 4] Boya Lake campground is 60 miles onto the Cassiar Highway junction with the Alaska Highway.



 From Whitehorse south the fall was not as well advanced as it had been the first two days and there are a lot more still green trees.  But as we walked briefly along the shore of Boya Lake there was a fair amount of color

We had clouds, some rain, sunshine alternating all day long.  The road is completely paved now, a big difference from when we first drove down the Cassiar and it was mostly dirt and mud.  More traffic too now.  



And there is still construction, but we didn't have much delay yesterday. 

We had a sunny lunch break with some heated up spaghetti.






























It was raining ahead, and soon we were in it.  Then it was over again. 

We saw eight black bear today in four encounters - one was a mother with three cubs.  But none were conducive to photography. 

There putting in these huge power poles along the southern part of the road.  Everyone should have access to electricity, but these are so obtrusive along the highway, such an assault on the natural landscape. 









We got down to the Yellowhead Highway (Between Prince George and Prince Rupert) and camped at Seeley Lake and did a short walk along the lake at dusk.

The campsite is right along the highway and pretty noisy, but I slept well anyway.

It's great to be out in this beautiful country and away from everyday things.  We listened to The Snow Child on CD which was good for driving in the north, but it did go on and on and on.

Here's a glimpse into Day 4:  We're at the Skeena Bakery in Hazelton, a short distance from the campground.  We discovered this on our trip this way three years ago.  Like Bridges Cafe in Whitehorse, they have a public service function too - here they work with special needs adults. 

Anchorage to Seattle Day 3: Haines Junction to Boya Lake

We were at the library at Whitehorse so I could post and then went to lunch nearby.




 
 Bridges is a small cafe with healthy food and they also take in youth from a nearby development/training program to give them job skills.  We had a great black bean soup - part was pureed but she left in some of the whole beans to give it more texture. 

 Back to the library to get the van and off down the road. 

 This metal bridge made a racket as we crossed over from Teslin, Yukon.  Below is a shot of Teslin and the bridge.

The trees are quite in full fall colors here yet.  Just starting.  




This is one of three salmon signs at the Teslin lookout point. 

 As we headed southeast toward the Cassiar Highway cutoff (just before Watson Lake) we began to get blue sky and great clouds.   We ended up at Boya Lake campground, about 60 miles from the junction of the Cassiar and Alaska Highways. 

 

 We've passed about six bicyclists with well loaded panniers.  Three in one group, a single, and a pair.

Doing this quickly in Dease Lake, BC at the learning center.  Sun's out again. 

Anchorage to Seattle Day 2B: Into Canada, Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

There was road construction between the US Customs station and the Canadian Customs station.  But what an incredible background.

The birch and aspen and other plants were so yellow and golden and even red, that despite clouds it was ‘sunny’ everywhere we looked. 

White River, I think

These are both at Kluane Lake.  Lots of low hanging clouds, some rain, and snow higher up.

 

The swans are headed south.  We saw maybe a dozen, but this pair was close to the highway at a place where we could stop.  Trumpeters.



As the title says, it was cloudy, but the bright fall colors made it look sunny.  And toward 7:30pm (we lost an hour entering Canada) the sun did come out just past Haines Junction at Paint Rock.  We camped near by at Pine Lake Campground.

Soft Foods, Sex In A Canoe, Translation, Hate Speech, and Fighting Over Words - "New" Books At The UAA Library

I'm back in LA to check up on my mom - a night flight that leaves me a little sleepy.  But my mom sounds like my mom again which is much better than the way I left her last week.  Before I left Anchorage late last night, I took some books back to the UAA library and checked out the new book section.

I'm not recommending any of these because I haven't read them, but the point is to remind folks that there's lots of interesting stuff out there.  People with a regular Municipal library card can check books out at UAA.  (Or even from your local library.)  This is just a small sampling of what's there.  I also noticed, doing this post, that what's new to the University of Alaska Anchorage's Consortium Library, isn't necessarily a new book.  One was published in 2007.

Also, as you look at these, think about guidelines you'd offer publishers about book covers. 


 I lumped these first three together because they all are connected to words (or speech).  The first, Roger Shuy's Fighting Over Words:  Language and Civil Law Cases.  A Times Higher Education 2008 review says, in part:

Fighting over Words is a short book, packed with corporate cases. These range from contract disputes and deceptive trade practices, through product liability, copyright infringement, discrimination, trademarks and fraud. The legal categories group together complex lived experiences in which language became a crux of dispute: whether, as an insurer maintained, an airline pilot's final words before a fatal crash showed evidence of having been overcome by toxic gas in the cockpit; whether, in a housing case, people's ability to recognise ethnic accents on the telephone offered a means of racial discrimination; whether warning statements provided with a potentially dangerous product were comprehensible and sufficiently prominent; whether a company's public pronouncements showed a tendency towards age discrimination in employment; whether a contractor misrepresented its cost calculations in bidding for a government military aviation contract. It is impossible to read through such actions without constant toing and froing between the case in hand and general issues in corporate and governmental communication that make such cases topical.

Clearly related to the recent post I had on the Asiana crash in San Francisco. 


 Words, Images, and Performances in Translation, edited by Rita Wilso and Brigit Maher, is summarized by the publisher, Bloomsbury:

This volume presents fresh approaches to the role that translation – in its many forms – plays in enabling and mediating global cultural exchange. As modes of communication and textual production continue to evolve, the field of translation studies has an increasingly important role in exploring the ways in which words, images and performances are translated and reinterpreted in new socio-cultural contexts. The book includes an innovative mix of literary, cultural and intersemiotic perspectives and represents a wide range of languages and cultures. The contributions are all linked by a shared focus on the place of translation in the contemporary world, and the ways in which translation, and the discipline of translation studies, can shed light on questions of inter- and hypertextuality, multimodality and globalization in contemporary cultural production.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart - something I dealt with first hand doing research in China with my Hong Kong students able to tell me later what really was said when the official translator strayed.  Actually, my students disagreed with each other, highlighting that the miscommunication is already in the original language and only compounded by going to another language.


The last of the first three, Jeremy Waldron's The Harm In Hate Speech appears to be a response to those who reject hate speech laws as contrary to the First Amendment.  You can read more about the book at Harvard University Press and get links to podcasts of the author.  There are also links to responses to his book. 


There was a bunch of Alaska related books.  Below are just a few.

Leff Continuity turns out to have been published in 2007 and the back said it was about a woman's adventure with her husband to Alaska followed fairly closely by her husband's death and her life in Alaska since.

The bluish volume is one of several theses by APU students.  This one is by Leeann B. Tyree and is titled Teaching Literacy - today and tomorrow, Literacy Vocabulary Development for Students and Teacher Practices - Grades 4-12 in Rural Alaska.

Cracking the Code is a small handbook by Cindy Roberts that is an attempt to give people an overview of the gas pipeline proposal(s?). 

There were two cookbooks on soft foods:  The Dysphagia Cookbook and Soft Foods for Easier Eating. 

I have to believe there's a reason why there are two books on this topic. 



This next one  On Extinction:  How We Became Estranged From Nature.  by Melanie Challenger looked interesting, The Guardian only gave it a so-so review::

Challenger's privilege is great, her courage exemplary, and no one could doubt her passion. This book is an urgent attempt to understand how we got into this mess, and how we might go forward, knowing that we are capable of causing, and of feeling, great loss. Assiduous editing might have helped, because while Challenger has a good eye and a nice turn of phrase, there is a piling up of references that seems born more of anxiety than erudition.

 Here are a couple about Soviet literature and theater.

Here's a short excerpt from an interview with TV on Strike author, a Variety deputy editor, at the Syracuse University Press:

“The book looks at the upheaval in the television business during the past decade through the prism of the 100-day strike by the Writers Guild of America in late 2007-early 2008. The strike was a fight about many of the issues that are roiling Hollywood – digital distribution, changing viewer behavior, competition from lower-cost entertainment alternatives and shrinking margins in traditional profit centers. I realized about a month after the strike ended that the story of the conflict, and the colorful characters who drove it, provided the perfect framework to examine what would otherwise be an unwieldy subject, namely the transformation of the television business.”

Did you forget to think about guidelines for good book covers?

It seems to me that there are two critical goals:

• making the title and the author's name easy to read 
• Some short description (or visual hint) about the topic 

The title of this last book,  The Great White North, meets those criteria.  I was totally misled by the title, but the subtitle pulled me back to what the author intended.    From a review at Alternatives Journal:

". . . Repeating an old saw, Margaret Wente previously wrote that what makes someone Canadian is having sex in a canoe. Maybe new immigrants should be taught to canoe, Wente said, so they could be more patriotic.

The editors of this book took her to task in their introduction. They wrote that this perception, “Canada = Canoeing,” was just one of the ways a European colonial mentality permeates both our sense of nation and nature. Wente lashed back in the pages of the broadsheet. I hope environmentalists will listen better than she did. .  .

Two early chapters contrast the way “nature” was moralized around ethnicity. City planners in Toronto at the turn of the 20th century advocated the creation of parks to “civilize” and Canadianize new immigrants. Nature was “good.”

The next chapter, an analysis of the rhetoric around Toronto’s SARS outbreak in 2005, demonstrates nature as “bad” or a threat. Media reports highlighted the virus’ origin in Asia, and as fear rose, nature – via SARS – became equated with the immigrants being a threat. Life-saving nurses were reframed as immigrant or ethnic nurses putting “us” at risk by possibly passing on the pathogen. "

 Just that little bit from the review is making me think about the divide between urban and rural Alaska, between Native and non-Native Alaska, and the role of immigration - which still means to most non-Native Alaskans, non-white immigrants and not non-Native immigrants. 

And stepping back a bit, for a more apt comparison to the book, how does  the Canadian mythology of the Great White North compare to the Lower 48 myths about Alaska? 

AIFF 2012: Vikram Dasgupta Talks About Calcutta Taxi

Gilles Guerraz, director of Lapse

I somehow latched onto the "Native Tongue" program and communicated with two of the four film makers.  There's a post with an overview of all four films.  And one with director Roozbeh Dadvand's (Mossadegh) email interview.  And I chatted with Gilles Guerraz* (Lapse)via Skype.  But I hadn't gotten hold of Calcutta Taxi's director and assumed it he wasn't coming.  But there he was.

They are all playing together

Saturday Morning at 

11 am 

at the Alaska Experience Theater.

And here's Vikram last night after Deadfall.  He was not excited about how close the camera was and when we tried to do it again at a quieter spot it wasn't as natural and he said ok.  He is right about the lighting.   But you get a sense of Vikram's energy and charm and the after film crowd at the Bear Tooth last night.  So, this is dedicated to his mom and his wife. 

*I have a lot of video of my chat with Gilles Guerraz. Too much video. I'll try to edit it and post a short bit of it before the film shows again next week.

AIFF 2012: Take Saturday Morning Tour to Iran, India (Calcutta), and France

You can book a package tour to many exotic places around the world. For $2500 - $20,000 plus airfare, you will be shown the sights of anywhere in the world. Or, for $8, you can go to the Alaska Experience Theater at 11 am and go on four intimate trips - about 20 minutes each. And remember, exotic just means some place you've never been. After all, most people in the world think that Alaska is exotic.

Really, these four films will take you on adventures that are much better than staying home cleaning the bathroom or wasting even more time on the internet. (Don't deny it.  After all, you're here.  Justify your time here by going to a movie.) And when the program is done there's still time to see if the ski trails are decent enough to use. And unlike the many package tours that will cost you thousands of dollars, this short tour will take you inside the lives of people you would never meet on a tour.

SATURDAY, DEC. 1, 2012  

11AM  

ALASKA EXPERIENCE THEATER, 4th&C

The tour goes again on SUNDAY DEC. 9, 2012 11:15 AM.  Same location.  


 Mossadegh

First the tour will take you to Iran, 1959. If you saw Argo, you saw a brief overview of the CIA overthrow of the first democratically elected leader in Iran - Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Six years later, under house arrest, he's ill. An American doctor comes to care for him. Is this his assassin? Directed by a USC film student of Iranian descent, the film offers an immigrant's view of the events. And Voice of America has a couple of interviews, broadcast in Farsi (I assume) about the film.  Check their website.

Calcutta Taxi

Next go wildly through Calcutta trying to find the taxi that went off with your luggage.  (The trailer hints this is just a metaphor for seeking much bigger things.)  Oh yes, there are demonstrations going on at the same time.  I can't find too much about this one.  It looks like the film maker is an Indian-Canadian.  Based on the trailer, you'll definitely go places you'd never go as a tourist.  To get ready, here's a deleted scene they have on the website of a street vendor making Indian cha.   India with no visa and no shots.

Naagahaan, Zinat… (Suddenly, Zinat…)

Back to Iran.  Today.  The Anchorage audience will feel at home in Teheran as the camera briefly catches the snow covered mountains surrounding Iran's capital.  I think most people will also be suprised at how much the Iranian middle class life compares to ours, at least in terms of consumer goods.  Not as ostentatious, but not so different.  A poor drug addict visits a middle class mother to claim the baby she gave up for adoption seven or eight years ago.  This film was made, from what I can tell, in Iran, by Iranians.  Americans should see more films from Iran so they can realize we have way more in common than not.  There's an interview with the film maker here and the whole fim itself is posted. 

Lapse

Finally, we head to Paris.  A thriller it looks like.  You can see Gilles Guerraz, the film maker's, pitch (with English subtitles) at what appears to be a French version of Kickstarter.  The trailer shows a beautiful woman disappearing around corners and into alleys and a man who doesn't remember something important, except that he has a feeling for this woman he keeps seeing.



When was the last time you got to Teheran?  Or Calcutta?  Or Paris?  (I think Lapse was shot in Paris, but that's just a guess.)  Well, do them all next Saturday (Dec. 1)  morning at 11 am at the Alaska Experience Theater.  The whole package for just $8.  There's a second tour a week later Sunday, Dec. 8. 

Here's the Film Festival link to this group of films titled "Native Tongue."   Yes, it's true, if you don't speak Farsi or French or Bengali you'll have to read subtitles, though the first two have some English spoken.  It's the price you have to pay to see grown up films that weren't made in the US.  (Well, the first one was. All this categorization gets confusing.)

Coincidence? - Documenta 13 Opened Today in Kassel

At the National Gallery of Art's East Wing two years ago, I saw this Max Ernst sculpture and told J that I'd once sat on it.  Back when I was a student in Germany, at big art exhibit in Kassel, Dokumenta 3.  I thought.  And somewhere there is a picture of me on it.  Maybe.  Possibly it was just a similar piece. I was tempted to sit on it again and have her take my picture, but the guard was watching me.


Today, June 9, 2012, I have been cleaning up downstairs.  Throwing away old papers I no longer need, resorting the ones I'm not ready to toss, and thinking about converting some old papers into articles.

When I ran across, finally, this picture.

OK, so this isn't such a big coincidence.  Eventually I was going to find this picture.

BUT, then I looked up Documenta.  This exhibit happens every five years.  And it turns out, (from the Daily Beast):

The twice-a-decade show is launching Saturday, June 9, in Kassel, Germany, in its 13th incarnation.

From Deutsche Welle:

The German President Joachim Gauck has opened one of the world's biggest contemporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art in Kassel, central Germany.

The thirteenth edition of one of the world's biggest and most ambitious contemporary art fairs opens in Kassel on the Fulda River in the northern part of the state Hesse in Germany.
Held every five years since 1955, the fair exhibits works by artists over a period of 100 days. This year's event features works by nearly 300 artists from 56 countries. Exhibits include cottages brimming with strange objects, sounds of the Brazilian jungle and a West African theatrical performance.
Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, a US-born Italian-Bulgarian, explained the festival's role at the opening: "Documenta is dedicated to artistic research and forms of imagination that explore commitment, matter, things, embodiment."

And here's a video from Documenta 13 from Newsweek and Daily Beast art critic Blake Gropnik:


There are some questions though. If it's every 5 years, and this is 2012, how did I see it in September 1964? Wikipedia answers that quickly.  Its entry has a list of the 13 Documentas since 1955. The second one was in 1959, and the third one in 1964. They don't seem to have gotten onto a regular five year cycle until 1972.

People like to attribute events like my finding this picture on the day Documenta opens this year on something more than coincidence.  With 365 days in a year, and with there being a Documenta every five years, the odds of my finding the picture on this particular day is a bit more than 1800 to 1.  You had a much better chance of picking the winner of the Belmont today.  1800 to 1 is roughly 50 chances in 100,000, which is about twice as likely as dying from Alzheimers in the US in 2009.   (Some of you may think that's a strange relationship, but it is important for people to think about numbers and statistics with rationality and with facts.  The odds were high, but these coincidences do happen.)

The Deutsche Welle piece says that there will be three other Documenta locations this year:

Kassel is not the only venue for Documenta; this year a fifth of the works are being shown in other locations including Kabul, Afghanistan, Kairo, Egypt and Banff in Canada.

 So, Alaskans driving Outside this summer, can stop by in Banff.   And those stationed in Afghanistan might be able to partake as well.

OK, one more bit of trivia.  While I was looking for the Max Ernst piece on my blog, I found him mentioned in one of my posts in honor of Claude Lévi-Strauss' 100th birthday.  Lévi-Strauss is being interviewed in 1940 or 41 about his time teaching at NYU:

D.E. You were a young, unknown university professor, and you became part of a group of famous artists - stars, even - Breton, Tanguy, Duchamp...
C.L-S. And Leonora Carrington, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Matta, Wifredo Lam. . . Masson and Calder were living in the country. I went to see them on a few weekends.
D.E. Did you like the members of the group?
C.L-S. Some of them. I liked Max Ernst right away, and he is the one I stayed closest to. Tanguy, whose painting I admired a great deal, was not an easy person. Duchamp had great kindness, and for awhile Masson and I were very close. I also became friends with Patrick Waldberg. Our friendship continued after the war ended.
D.E. Peggy Guggenheim was financing the existence of the group?
C.L-S. She helped this or that one out financially, but Max Ernst, whom she married, was more affluent than the others. They were leading the Bohemian life in Greenwich Village. Until Max Ernst left Peggy Guggenheim. One day, Breton called to ask me if I had a small sum of money to buy back one of his Indian objects from Max Ernst, who was now broke. This historic object is now in the Musée de l'Homme.

 And things mentioned in here lead in a thousand more directions which I'll leave for any of you reading this to pursue on your own.

Darrell Dennis - Tales of an Urban Indian

Gramma Susie was broad humor with a bite.  In the Gramma Susie costume, Sharon Shorty could play the classic role of the king's fool and say things that normally wouldn't be tolerated.

Darrell Dennis' humor was there to cover the pain.  First the universal pains of growing up and becoming a man.  Second, the additional pain of growing up as a member of an outsider group - in this case as a North American Indian.  Darrell's a charming, good looking man whose very presence on stage is in sharp contrast to the gritty story he tells of alcohol, sex, and drugs.  The stories he tells are powerful and his performance magnifies their power.  And the humor makes it possible to stay and listen. 

I'm really glad friends got us out to see these two pieces at the Alaska Native Heritage Center Saturday night.  I've already posted about Shorty.  Now I offer you a short video to give you a sense of Darrell's performance.  And yes, I did get his permission to post this too, though I did say it would be maybe 30 seconds, and it came out to 2 minutes. 

Raven Clan's Gramma Susie Makes For Non-Stop Laughter

Gramma Susie with 'grandson' Caleb

I wanted to put some catchy line in the title, but it was the performance of Sharon Shorty as Gramma Susie, not just the words, that had the audience laughing so hard last night at the Alaska Native Heritage Center.

Her act was part of an eight day "alerNative Theatre Festival."

There was a second, one actor play - Tales of an Urban Indian - by Darrell Dennis which tapped into an edgier humor to bring underlying issues in Gramma Susie right up to the surface.  I'll put up video of Darrell Dennis in the next post.   In this post, I offer you some video from Gramma Susie.

Sharon Shorty after performance

As I edited the video, I laughed over and over again each time I saw the clips. It's not so much the jokes, but how she tells them. True genius. And she's been winning awards for her performances even though they don't quite fit into most standard categories.

"Sharon Shorty has been voted one of the TOP 10 YUKONERS to meet (Up Here Magazine, 1999) and is from the Tlingit, Northern Tutchone and Norwegian People. Sharon is from the Raven Clan and was raised with the storytelling tradition of her southern Yukon community." 

Sharon is also an award winning actor (Aurora Award, 1997) and Storyteller (Aurora Award, 1998). She has received the Ross Charles Award (1999), the CTV Fellowship (1999) and The Yukon Filmmaker's Fund Award (1999). And more importantly, Sharon is an award-winning Bannock-Maker! (New Yukon Indian Days, 2003)  She was also recently named "Best Comedian" and "Best way to dress as an Elder"." 

She also performed at the Vancouver Winter Olympics.  Find out more at her website.

I edited the video a bit out of order so you could hear her dead-on raven call first (and last.)  She's from the raven clan and when she introduces herself, she gives her lineage in English and Tlingit.  There's a hint of the humor already, but it really starts after honoring her heritage.  If you can use a smile, just watch the video. All of it.

  


By the way, I asked Sharon after the performance if I could post the video and she generously consented.  And also said to credit 'grandson' Caleb who plays the drum in one clip.  (He gave permission too.)

"as a scientist, I should not be undertaking research on something if I didn't understand the ramifications of what the results could do."

Alexandra Morton is a biologist who moved to a small British Columbia community to study orcas,  who writes a blog about salmon.  From her blog bio:

In 1987, the first salmon farm appeared and I thought it was a good idea. I hoped it would help bring more people to the area and keep the little town alive. But from the beginning there were problems. First, the government put the farms where they promised us they would not. Then the farmers used underwater sounds that drove the whales I was studying away (Morton and Symmonds 2002). Then there were bacterial epidemics (furunculosis), toxic algae blooms (Heterosigma), escaped Atlantic salmon (Morton and Volpe 2002) and then the sea lice epidemics began (see references below).

From the beginning, I expected government to recognize the problems and explain how they would remedy them, but I was naive. Today, Echo Bay has no school and very few residents. There are 27 Norwegian fish farms operating and the companies are loosing money. They do not hire local people and use drugs to try and deal with their pathogen problems with no notification to the local people who fish for food in the area.

Today she has a post that begins:

I just finished reading the approximately 450 pages of transcript of the last three days of the Cohen Inquiry. I highly recommend them, they can be found at www.cohencommission.ca Go to Calendar and Transcripts and see dates December 15, 16, 19.

The basic message I got from reading the post was:   the hearings have shown that the Canadian government has been overseeing the fish farms with the aim of making sure information that could jeopardize the business was unavailable.  

Her blog post is a summary of the transcript with some quotes such as:

McDADE (Lawyer examining aquaculture): … as of the 24th, senior people in DFO were aware that the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo was finding ISA?
DR. MILLER: By the 24th, they were aware of my work, yes.
MCDADE: And so when statements were coming out from DFO after November 24th, and in particular, the statement from the Minister on December 2nd, saying they were not aware of any ISA, that would have been a surprise to you, wasn't it?
DR. MILLER: Yes, it was, but nobody was speaking to me at that point.

ROSENBLOOM: Did he say anything in terms of how positive findings might be consequential in terms of our relations with the Americans?
DR. MILLER: I think he just intimated that I, as a scientist, would not understand the complexities of these issues and that, as a scientist, I should not be undertaking research on something if I didn't understand the ramifications of what the results could do.

I'm not a fish expert.  I haven't read the whole report, and so I'm not really sure what all this means.  But,  if you're interested in fish policy, fish farming, or even the openness of the Canadian government, this is well worth your reading.   The sense conveyed in Miller's blog is that the government is suppressing data that would jeopardize commercial fish farming. 

Thanks to David Ottness' FB post for this.  Again, Andrea Morton's post is here.

AIFF 2011 - Peter Pasyk's Dueling Posters in "The Pole"

[The Anchorage Film Film Festival ended Sunday, Dec. 11, followed by three more days of Best of the Fest. I'm trying to put up video I didn't get to during the festival.]

I got to see The Pole as part of the supershorts before the Awards Dinner/Ceremony Sunday Dec. 11. Then I met the director, Peter Pasyk, and got him briefly on camera. I don't know about Peter, but I was getting tired and I used up most of my questions on other folks. Thanks Peter for putting up with my camera in your face with grace and humor and not too big a smirk.



The Pole is a nice super short which shows the competitive spirit of two young men who work putting up posters on Toronto street poles.  I can see it as a case study in a business or public administration class.  It raises lots of questions about free enterprise and government regulation. The fact that I was totally absorbed in the story suggests that he did all the technical stuff just right. I didn't even think about it.


The Pole could also be a nice metaphor for the US Congress today.
 The young men get so caught up in their short term goals, they lose all perspective and start engaging in self-defeating behavior in an attempt to out do each other. They pause and try a little cooperation, but that quickly falls apart too. If I were a better journalist, I would have asked him about whether he had intended this to be lesson for more than pole posters. If I remember correctly, he said this stemmed from personal experience.

Here's a clip of the movie from the YouTube site of the musicians Freres Lumieres.

AIFF 2011: Total Drama's Chris McLean Alter Ego Christian Potenza Talks About Moon Point

 Walking out of The Wedding Party  I ran into Christian Potenza.  How could I miss him with his wild hat and goggles?  It turns out this Canadian from Toronto is the host Chris McLean on the Canadian online animated reality show Total Drama.  

Image from Total Drama

He's in Anchorage for the showing of the film Moon Point,  which he co-produced. He also acts in it.    But let him tell you himself in the video.  Director Sean Cisterna is also in the video.  He also has some nice words for The Wedding Party which we'd just seen.





Moon Point plays at the Bear Tooth Tuesday, Dec. 6, at 8pm. Followed by the Canadian Consulate's reception.  It plays again Wednesday Dec. 7 at Out North at 7pm.

For more information check Moon Point's official website.

AIFF 2010: Features in Competition - The Wild Hunt

The Wild Hunt is the opening movie at this year's Anchorage International Film Festival. 

Wikipedia tells us about the (actual) Wild Hunt:

The Wild Hunt is an ancient folk myth prevalent across Northern, Western and Central Europe.  The fundamental premise in all instances is the same: a phantasmal group of huntsmen with the accoutrements of hunting, horses, hounds, etc., in mad pursuit across the skies or along the ground, or just above in
The hunters may be the dead or the fairies (often in folklore connected with the dead). The hunter may be an unidentified lost soul, a deity or spirit of either gender, or may be a historical or legendary figure like Theodoric the Great, the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag, the Welsh psychopomp Gwyn ap Nudd or the Germanic Woden (or other reflections of the same god, such as Alemannic Wuodan in Wuotis Heer ("Wuodan's Host") of Central Switzerland, Swabia etc.)

The movie itself involves a modern reenactment of the old Wild Hunt.  The synopsis from the movies website:

A MODERN MEDIEVAL SAGA, The Wild Hunt tells the story of Erik Magnusson, a young man who decides to follow his estranged girlfriend Evelyn into a medieval re-enactment game when he discovers that she has been seduced by one of the players.
As the down-to-earth Erik treks deeper into the game in search of his love, he inadvertently disrupts the delicate balance of the make believe fantasy-land.

Passions are unleashed. Rules are broken. Reality and fantasy collide. The good-hearted game turns into a tragedy of mythic proportion...

You probably also should know about LARP, which stands for Live Action Role Playing.  Unlike those who play games on computers, these are people who do it for real.  As I was writing this, I discovered that Movieset has already written my post, citing Wikipedia on LARP and on the specific LARP location and event where The Wild Hunt is set - Bicolle.  I'll just give you a snippet of what they have and you can see the rest for yourself at Movieset:

What is L.A.R.P.?
From Wikipedia:       
A live action role-playing game (LARP) is a form of role-playing game where the participants physically act out their characters' actions. The players pursue goals within a fictional setting represented by the real world, while interacting with each other in character. The outcome of player actions may be mediated by game rules, or determined by consensus among players.
The first LARPs were run in the late 1970s, inspired by role-playing games and genre fiction. .  .

 What is The Duchy of Bicolline?
From Wikipedia:        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicolline
Bicolline is a fantasy live action role-playing game (LARP) campaign in Quebec. Events take place at a dedicated venue covering 140 hectares called the Duchy of Bicolline located in Saint-Mathieu-du-Parc near Shawinigan, Québec.

The most passionate players involved over the years have built a medieval village with roads, bridges, ditches, an inn and a castle at the Duchy of Bicolline venue.  Players are responsible for their buildings and must follow standards of construction. The village is composed of one hundred buildings, with more being added. The demand for construction sites is such that one Bicolline staff member spends all year controlling applications, validating the plans for buildings, ensuring that projects are feasible, and so on. [Read it all at Movieset]

Sounds like they have their own version of zoning restrictions.  The actual Duchy of Bicolline site is in French.

Double Click to enlarge to see it clearly or go to original here.

 And The Wild Hunt was partially filmed at Duché de Bicolline.  The site has a poster of The Wild Hunt with this announcement:

Long métrage tourné au Duché de Bicolline incluant des scènes de la Grande Bataille 2008 et la participation de nombreux joueurs et joueuses. 

 or as Translate.reference interprets that:

Feature film shot in Duchy of Bicolline include scenes of the Great Battle of 2008 and the participation of many players and players

As Roger Ebert tells it:

Evelyn has left for the big weekend, where she will be captured, held hostage and otherwise be the center of attention. Erik is fed up. He goes out to the forest to talk sense to her, but his role-playing brother Bjorn (Mark A. Krupa) makes him wear a costume because It Is Not Permitted to Wear Just a T-Shirt.

If you want to check, you can read the Régles du Combat for Bataille du Bicolline.  My French is limited to words that look like English words and that page isn't copy-able so I couldn't find a rule about T-shirts.  Probably because those look like the rules of combat.

Ebert has a lot more to say and you can check out his review if you want to know more. Generally, he liked the movie and identified a bit with Erik. 

Twitchfilm also thinks you should see this (it's not clear who wrote the review - the byline is Todd Brown, but it also thanks Andrew David Long for the review.) This is from last December:

Alexandre Franchi just might be a genius, and his first feature shows the same lyric creativity and the same commitment to themes of imagination he displayed in his stellar collection of short films (Fata Morgana, Troll Concerto, etc.), all while suggesting - contrary to his earlier works - that reality must eventually destroy fantasy. . .

I would be remiss in neglecting to mention Claudine Sauvé's lovely 35mm cinematography, which nimbly integrates small crew documentary-style shoots and some intricate night scenes, and gives form to Franchi's lyric bent. 

Do yourself a favour and chase down a screening of The Wild Hunt.  You'll be glad you did, whether or not you believe Ragnarok is nigh. [This is the beginning and end of the review, for all of it go to Twitchfilm.]

It won the Best Canadian First Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival (2009) and the Audience Award for Best Narrative at Slamdance (2020.) 

This is said to have been done under a Canadian$500,000 budget.  I suspect doing it at the actual Duchy de Bicolline saved money on sets and costumes.  Also, the director knows something about money.  The website says:

After pursuing a successful banking career in Canada, the Persian Gulf and Central America, Alexandre decided to follow his passion for film and quit the business world for good. His stories, in which characters escape a dreary reality and find solace in the imaginary world, are a grim reminder of his old banking job. The Wild Hunt is his first feature.

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Individual posts on other Features in Competition:

The Temptation of St. Tony