AIFF 2018: Some Movies Today - I Think

Here's a list of films the AIFF Facebook page says are playing today.  Click the link for several days more.

[UPDATE 10:44AM:  BEAR TOOTH (I called) said no movies there today.]

DEC2

The Cleaners Today 3 PM · by Anchorage International Film Festival

Alaska Experience Theater Anchorage, AK

DEC2

Kings of The Yukon and Anote's Ark Today 5:30 PM · by Anchorage International Film Festival

Bear Tooth Theatrepub Anchorage, AK

Get Tickets

DEC2

Funny Story W/ The Cast and Crew Today 8 PM · by Anchorage International Film Festival

Bear Tooth Theatrepub Anchorage, AK

Get Tickets

I also got an email yesterday with this message about another film:

"We just learned that Anote's Ark is showing at the Alaska Experience Theater (because the Beartooth is picking up their mess) at 5:30 tomorrow as part of the Anchorage Int'l Film Festival.  One of the documentary programmers told me that "you really want to see this film -- it is gorgeous".  It's about Kiribati and climate change.  I hope you can make it to the movie.  It's an excellent flick and let's pack the house.  Tim is giving a short talk to go with it."

AIFF website blog from Dec. 1

"2018 Update! We hope everyone is safe after yesterday’s adventure! Sadly Bear Tooth has experienced some set backs, but lucky for us Alaska Experience Theater has jumped in! We are busy getting things set up for today and will be ready to screen our first showing at 6pm today of We Up! Our schedule will change a little tonight. We will do 2 screenings of We Up to accommodate the huge interest. The first screening will be at 6pm and the second screening will be at 8pm. 5 Day Film Royal will announce its new screening date on Monday! This Mountain Life will be scheduled later this week. Bare with us as we work through these hurdles! Thanks for the support! The community has been fantastic. See you tonight at AIFF 2018!!
After Party with Ukulele Russ at The Carousel Lounge! Come celebrate the festival with good music, good people and a cocktail!"

The Aftershock Jitters

It starts with a rumble.  And it may end there.  But then there might also be a few jolts, or just general low level shaking.  Nothing like this morning.  At first I didn't pay much attention, knowing in my head that they were just aftershocks.  But my body isn't always attached to my head, and it's starting to perk up with each initial rumble.  It seems to be viscerally asking, "Is this a nothing, or is this going to be more serious?"

I looked at the earthquake label on this blog.  I found eight posts with a magnitude level listed in the title - from 4.1 to 6.2 - since 2012.  (There were other earthquake posts as well.) My point is that they were significant enough to get me to blog about them.  We've already had more than eight aftershocks in that range already.  

Notice, the listing below was 7 hours after the big quake, or at about 3:30 pm.  It's 1 am as i write this.

Here's a map showing the magnitude 7.0 along with all of the aftershocks we reviewed in the 7 hours after the quake. Most aftershocks have not yet been reviewed and are not on this map, but these precise locations give a good overview of the sequence so far. pic.twitter.com/FM7oZL7t4n

— AK Earthquake Center (@AKearthquake) December 1, 2018

(Anchorage is that pig snout just below the lowest red dot.)

A follow up Tweet says:

"The little black dots on the map are just a way of showing what the background seismicity looks like. It's all of the historic earthquakes larger than magnitude 2, not scaled for magnitude."

And then t0here's this, which is base, I guess, on the premise that knowledge is a good thing, that we'll be comforted knowing what's ahead.  Part of me agrees.  Another part says a 4% chance of another 7,0 sway too high.

AIFF 2018: Earthquake Shakes Up Festival - Opening Night Cancelled While Bear Tooth Cleans Up

 I talked today and he said they were cleaning up damage and there'd be no films there tonight.  I even went by to see, but the door was locked and it's hard to see much, but what I could see didn't look damaged.

I can't find anything on the Film Festival Website, but their FaceBook page has this cryptic announcement I just found:

What exactly does this mean?  I called the Matanuska Brewing Company, where the after party was scheduled, thinking they might show films there.  But no.  No films there.  No after party.  But maybe folks will go there just to party.

I did go by the Bear Tooth this afternoon to see if I could assess the damage and whether they might be open tomorrow.  But it was all locked up.

Strongest Earthquake I've Ever Experienced Just Now In Anchorage - Updating Regularly

House shook violently.

Pictures still on hooks, but at slants.

Things fell out of bathroom cabinet, off shelves.

I'll update this.

UPDATE 8:50am

There was an aftershock, not as violent, but still one of the strongest earthquakes I've felt (I grew up in LA and went through the 1971 earthquake, plus numerous ones here in Anchorage)

Some pictures inside our house.

UPDATE:  9:01 - a second smaller aftershock.  Earthquake Center says preliminary estimate was 7.0 10 miles north of Anchorage.  I've been in 7.0 before and this was far, far stronger. But that has to do with how close you are to the epicenter.  We apparently were close.

Update  9:14am -  Another very minor aftershock.  Here's a map from the USGS website:

Click to enlarge and focu

The shaking must be related to how close this was - very.


UPDATE 9:17:  Another Tweet from the Alaska Earthquake Center - I'll just copy the text so it's easier to read:

Tweets
AK Earthquake Center
‏
Verified account

@AKearthquake
 1m1 minute ago
More
Fortunately we are headquartered in Fairbanks, so we're fully operational up here with the exception of the website slowdown. We do not yet have much information about the situation on the ground in Anchorage beyond widespread power outages and non-specific reports of damage.

As you can tell - at our house the electricity is still working - internet connection is ok.  We are just west of the UAA.  Water and gas are working.

UPDATE 9:21 - I had looked out the window just before the earthquake hit and saw - another aftershock as I'm writing, but just creaking - the school bus pull up to pick up kids.  After the earthquake, I looked out again and saw it drive away.

UPDATE 9:29am  Here's a message - apropos my last update - from the School District

Emergency message from ASD, asking parents to pick up students @ktva #Earthquake pic.twitter.com/NaX7SzAiFv

— Daniella Rivera (@RiveraDanie) November 30, 2018

UPDATE 10:09 am - Well we went to check on downstairs.  It looked ok, but the door to the downstairs bedroom was closed and something behind it was blocking it.  There were some old mirrors and pictures behind the door.  After some experimenting, I was able to get my hand through the door and to push them back far enough to open the door.  Here's a picture of them after we got in.









It was the book case that I was worried about.  Attaching it better to the wall was still on my todo list.  But it was fine.  Not one book fell off.

I assume the shaking is more severe on the second floor than on the first floor.  But it also looks like the house shook east/west.  This book shelf is facing north.  But then I went into the garage and two shelves had fallen over.  These were west facing walls that the shelves fell from.

Another minor rattle as I'm putting up these pics.

But my $90 million David Hockney picture was fine right next to the shelf above.

The pictures on the wall along the stairs were fine (the wall faces east.)

And in the kitchen all was ok - I've been worried about the wine glasses all along.  It's looks like things moved inside the cabinet about 1/2 an inch east, but everything was ok.  The cabinet door was closed.


UPDATE 10:26:  Just had another aftershock - Not terrible, but something I would have blogged about - clearly more shaking but just a few seconds.


UPDATE 10:47 - Getting phone calls and messages from folks outside.  We're ok.  But here's a link to a Twitter feed from Dustin Miller that is collecting Tweets about the earthquake.  There's some serious damage around town.

It looks like the Minnesota Offramp to International Airport Road collapsed.  Screenshot is from a tweeted video on on Dustin's Twitter thread.

UPDATE 12:46PM   Just talked to the manager at the Bear Tooth Theater where the Anchorage International Film Festival was supposed to have its opening night tonight.  The theater has been damaged and there will be NO FILMS today.  They aren't sure about tomorrow.

City Planning Dept Holds Community Meeting On Waldron Lake Planning

Here's Waldron Lake from a 2012 post when the area was flooding.










At the church across the street from the Waldron Lake Park parking lot (where apparently people don't have legal access to park), the Muni held an initial community input meeting.

I put to pics together and you can tell if you look carefully - even not so carefully

Here's a map of the area - I added street names  The park is the area in yellow.


Here's some background from the MOA (Municipality of Anchorage - AKA Muni) website on this project:

"PROJECT OVERVIEW
Waldon Lake Park is Anchorage’s newest park.  In 2015, the Municipality of Anchorage purchased the property from the Boys & Girls Club of Southcentral Alaska for $3.92M with funds from an Alaska State Legislative Grant.
The 16.95 acre park is zoned PLI and will remain parkland into the future.  To ensure that future development of the park meets the needs of the community, Anchorage Parks and Recreation is developing a master plan."

It's hard to think of it as a new park.  My daughter played soccer there 30 some years ago.  But it's new as an MOA official park.

There were no formal presentations.  People could look at the maps and prior comments and talk with MOA employees in charge of this.

If you click on it, it will focus better

Here are some maps of the land over the years.  1960-70 appears to be when the area developed.

If you missed the meeting and want to be involved, here's the MOA web page for this.

Almost Headed Home - Kindergarten, Rainbows, and Poke

Part of volunteering at my granddaughter's school is prep work for the teacher.  Had to copy the numbers onto the yellow paper, then cut them up.  There were also booklets to copy, cut, and staple.  Then sit with a group during reading and be a resource.  I was surprised at what fluent readers some of the kids were.  And they had use of tablets and earphones to listen to someone read as the words turn red as their spoken.

Later in the day I walked to the school bus stop and waited in the sun and rain.  When I figured I should look for the rainbow, I just had to look up.

And we all ate at the nearby Japanese restaurant.  I've been poke spoiled since Hawaii and this poke was good and spicy.

And one of the sushi rolls.




We're at the airport waiting to board.  It's been warm - in the 50s.

AIFF 2018: Shorts In Competition - From Australia To Finland, Canada, Holland, And USA

Films in competition are the film the screeners picked as the best in their category.  The shorts category was the only one I was able to get a list of the films in competition.  So here's a list, a little information, and the times they'll be shown.  Best as I can tell from the schedule, these only show once each.  They are part of programs of several short films, so the starting times are for when the program begins.  The program links below will show the other films playing in that particular program. I've put them

Here are the Shorts in Competition.  



Field Guide to Being a 12-year-old Girl

Directed by Tilda Cobham-Hervey
Country of Origin - Australia
(20 M)
Opening Night - Fri. Nov. 30, 2018  Bear Tooth  6:30pm

This is a film about 12-year-old girls, made by 12-year-old girls, for 12-year-old girls, or anyone that has been a 12-year-old girl, or will be a 12-year-old girl, or wishes they were a 12-year-old girl.

"Created by Tilda Cobham-Hervey with twelve 12-year-old-girls, this film is a cross between a documentary and a theatre piece, where real girls articulate what they hope for, what they remember and what it feels like to be 12. Performing themselves as part of a filmed field-guide, together these specimens investigate their own species."  (From the Lowdownunder)

Fauve (Canada)
Directed by: Jeremy Comte
16 min

Global Village Program Sat. Dec. 1  Ak Exp Theater  3pm
Set in a surface mine, two boys sink into a seemingly innocent power game with Mother Nature as the sole observer.

This is a powerful and difficult film.  The video below is the whole film.

About The Birds and the Bees (Finland)

Directed by: J.J. Vanhanen

12 min
Global Village Program Sat. Dec. 1  Ak Exp Theater  3pm

A quiet farmer father and his son set out on a trip to the pharmacy after the teen has a little accident with his girlfriend.

About the Birds And the Bees - Trailer (English subtitles) from J.J. Vanhanen on Vimeo.

Emergency
Directed by: Carey Williams
Country of Origin: USA

12 Min

Martini Matinee Thursday Dec. 6 Bear Tooth 2:30pm

Faced with an emergency situation, a group of young Black and Latino friends carefully weigh the pros and cons of calling the police.

This film has won a number of awards, including Best at Sundance.  

"EMERGENCY" Teaser from CDUB on Vimeo.

Here's an interview with the director and the producer last February

Sirene
Directed By: Zara Dwinger
Country of Origin: Netherlands
26 min
Year of the Woman Shorts Program Sat. Dec. 8, 3pm AK Experience 

SIRENE is a film about confusion, friendship and becoming who you are. The 15-year old Kay lives a boy's life in between roaring motorcross bikes.When the enchanting Melody sails into his life on a big boat, their flourishing friendship lures him towards this dormant feeling. When it turns out they both had a different idea about their friendship, Kay doesn't know what to feel and to do anymore. He decides to drastically go against his feelings and Kay gets even more tangled up in his own confusion...

Teaser SIRENE from Zara Gina on Vimeo.

Sirene's website is here.

Waiting For The Shoe To Drop: "[Trump's defense] so far is not recognizable to an attorney as any sort of legal defense at all"

I got this email teaser this morning. It's for a book that keeps Trump's lies alive.  (Sure, it's worth someone checking out just to see if there's anything there that can help understand all this, but one person can buy one copy and tell us about it.)

I'm wondering why they are featuring a book by apologists for the president.  I guess that's part of 'being fair' and offering 'both' sides to every argument. I learned long ago - sometimes there is only one right side and the other side is wrong.

Another book came out last week that I started reading.  I'm only into the first chapter, but this book promises to paint in a lot of the missing background to the indictments and other news bits occasionally escaping the Mueller investigation.

The title of Seth Abramson's new book Proof of Collusion:  How Trump Betrayed America  tells us Abramson's conclusion.   But that doesn't necessarily mean the book is biased or hype.  After all a book titled  Charles Manson: Proof of Murder wouldn't be questioned.

As I've written and rewritten this post, I've cut out some quotes that I surely need to share with you, so I'll just drop them in here. I also need something interesting in the title.

"[My work here is made easier] by the almost historic absence  . . . of any exculpatory evidence suggesting the president of the United States did not conspire with our enemies to violate federal law." 

"...the defense he and his team have mounted so far is not recognizable to an attorney as any sort of legal defense at all"

I wonder if the quote about the lack of a legal defense simply reflects Trump's disregard for any rules or laws that confine him and that he believes that he can win this politically.  Or perhaps those pursuing various policies and appointments hope simply to gain as much as they can from him before he crashes.

Now, to the book.

Introduction: A Theory Of The Case 

After pages of background and context, Abramson offers us this:

"In the case of the ongoing Trump-Russia probe, the only plausible theory of the case that coordinates with all the existing evidence is that Donald Trump and a core group of ten to twenty aides, associates, and allies conspired with a hostile foreign power to sell that power control over American's foreign policy in exchange for financial reward and - eventually - covert election assistance.  This theory doesn't contend that anyone in the president's sphere participated in any hacking or even knew about Russia's cyber-intrusions in advance;  it doesn't allege that the conspiracy many members of the Trump team were involved in was finely wrought, as opposed to chaotic, amateurish, and quickly capable of producing a mountain of incriminating evidence;  it doesn't require that all elements of its grand narrative take place in private, as indeed many of them occurred in the plain sight of millions of Americans;  and it doesn't allege that any of the actions involved rose to the level of statutory treason - a federal criminal statue that applies only if America is in a declared state of war.  What this theory of the case  does do is explain decades of suspicious behavior by Donald Trump, his family, and his closest associates, behavior that suggests that these bad actors expected and received a massive financial reward for taking policy positions friendly to the Kremlin and adverse to the interests of the United States.  The theory further maintains that once Trump had sufficient knowledge of Russian crimes to be legally responsible for not aiding and abetting them with promises of policies unilaterally beneficial to the Kremlin - a point Trump reached on August 17, 2016, a the very latests - any additional actions taken to advance Russian interests were criminal."
 

Chapter 1 is in three parts.

1.  The summary - About half a page and it begins like this:

"After fifteen years of financial failures in Russia - failures born not  of a lack of desire to succeed, but a lack of access to the people in Russia who make wealth creation possible - the Trumps discover that the key to making a fortune in real estate in Russia is greasing the skids with influential Russian officials.1  [I've left the footnote in and linked it, because Abramson tacks a source on most every claim.  That doesn't make it true, of course.  Someone else could have made it up.  There are three in this short summary]

2.  The Facts - Eleven pages of specific history, that covers Trump's failed attempts to do business in Russia, how his US businesses were funded by Russian mobsters when banks would no longer take the risk, and how things got better for Trump in Moscow after the Miss Universe contest in 2002 where the Trump picked winner was the girlfriend of a 'Russian gangster' and the object of Putin's 'secret admiration.' (At the bottom of the last page of facts is footnote 92.)

3.  Annotated History - 18 more pages (ending at footnote 193) of excerpts from the fact section, where Abramson expands on the meaning of those facts.



Abramson is like the Vin Scully of the Mueller investigation, giving color and background to the Trump-Russia investigations and other related questionable acts. When (I'm going with when, not if) the Mueller investigation starts becoming public, I suspect Proof of Collusion will be the  program used by many to figure out who all the players are.

So far in the book there's a lot of circumstantial evidence.  A lot of people whose spheres of influence overlap the worlds of Trump and of Putin.  This format results in a fair amount of repetition, but there is so much information, that's repetition is helpful.  And going back to the summary for this post was also helpful - being reminded what Abramson thinks is important.  I'd note that I had intended to focus on Chapter 1, but then the "Theory of the Case" seemed important too.  As an indication of how much is here, I'd forgotten that at the end of the Introduction, Abramson offers us a theory.  And so, I spent unnecessary time trying to reconstruct what his theory was from the first seven pages of the introduction.  His actual theory of the case only shows up on the last two pages.  But the exercise gives me more insight.

And I'd remind everyone that Abramson is not some flake writer simply gathering all the details that others have produced and organizing them.  He's got unique qualifications which you can see  at his wikipedia page.  He's got an interesting educational background.  For starters:

"Abramson is a graduate of Dartmouth College (1998), Harvard Law School (2001), the Iowa Writers' Workshop (2009), and the doctoral program in English at University of Wisconsin-Madison (2010; 2016).[1]"

You can read the Introduction (The Theory of the Case) and Chapter 1 here.

How To Shoot Up A Mall Without Getting Caught - This Only Works For Whites

In April 2014 I wrote a post titled How To Shoplift Without Getting Caught - This Only Works For Whites.  It recounted African-American astrophysicist  Neil Degrasse Tyson's story about how he got stopped for shoplifting white the actual white shoplifter walked out at the same time without being pursued at all.

 "I walked out of a store one time and the alarm went off and so they came running to me.  I walked through the gate at the same time a white male walked through the gate.  And that guy just walked off with the stolen goods, knowing they would stop me and not him.  That’s an interesting exploitation.  What a scam that was. People should do that more often."

This apparently works for shooters too.  From AP:

"HOOVER, Ala. (AP) — Protesters on Saturday marched through an Alabama shopping mall where police killed a black man they later acknowledged was not the triggerman in a Thanksgiving night shooting that wounded two people.
An officer shot and killed 21-year-old Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford, Jr. of Hueytown while responding to the Thursday mall shooting. Police said Bradford was fleeing the scene with a handgun.
Hoover police initially told reporters Bradford had shot a teen at the mall, but later retracted the statement."

I guess you just have to make sure there are innocent black men near you and the first responders will go after them while you get away.  

This is what is called a teaching moment.  People profess not to be racist.  Our president has said variations of "I'm the least racist person you've ever met" on at least  six occasions.   (That's probably not a good example, but we've all heard from many people that they aren't racists.)

And if they mean, they wouldn't use racial slurs it's probably true.  But racism is deeply embedded in our culture.  Television and movies have overwhelmingly put non-whites in negative roles over the years.  We hear repeatedly from the media and our friends that minorities are poor, on welfare, commit crimes We absorb that.  We don't hear as much about the structural reasons they're poor - redlining that keeps property values low in minority neighborhoods, the higher bars to get loans for minorities, lack of good educational opportunities in minority neighborhoods, and reluctance of landlords to rent to them and employers to higher them.  

So we all carry these stereotypes in our heads.  Even the targets of the stereotypes get infected.  

So in situation where someone has to make a split second decision about who the bad guy is - the shoplifter, the shooter, etc. - those stereotypes point the responders gun at the black guy, the Hispanic.

If Logic And Reason Don't Work, Perhaps It's Time For Poetry

Home 

by Warsan Shire

"You have to understand
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land"

The bio below is from Seekers Club:

"Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer and educator based in London. Born in 1988, Warsan has read her work extensively all over Britain and internationally – including recent readings in South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, North America and Kenya- and her début book, ‘TEACHING MY MOTHER HOW TO GIVE BIRTH’ (flipped eye), was published in 2011. Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology ‘The Salt Book of Younger Poets’ (Salt, 2011). She is the current poetry editor at SPOOK magazine. In 2012 she represented Somalia at the Poetry Parnassus, the festival of the world poets at the Southbank, London. She is a Complete Works II poet. Her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Warsan is also the unanimous winner of the 2013 Inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize."