Spring - A Sneak Preview

Wow, the sun was streaming in the windows this morning. The plows had been pushing all the snow into the middle of the road and were finally loading them into trucks to haul away. The sky was blue. It seemed like it had been a long time. A column in today's paper confirmed it. It has snowed in Anchorage 22 of the last 25 days! So that's why I've given up running for shoveling snow. And why the snow kept getting plowed, but never cleared.






I finally started digging out a parking space because I couldn't park in the street any more without blocking the street. You can see Jan 10, then Jan 12 almost ready. Wednesday a city pickup was blocking our driveway. The lady said, "They're going to plow the street on the 26th, so you have to move the car. But since it's a VW van - and I have one too - I was going to knock on your door instead of leaving a yellow notice on your car." She was very nice and friendly, but that doesn't seem like a very efficient way to notify people.

If my car hadn't been parked there when she came by, I wouldn't have know they were coming today. But since she told me, I parked it in the driveway yesterday, and well before that sun was up and streaming, we heard snow removal equipment. They started at about 7am in the neighborhood, and they were still at it at 3pm.

Here's the street all blocked up since early January. And today after it was all cleared.




But, we have our street back. It really is nice to have a parking place I don't have to carefully squeeze into because of the snow all around. On the other hand, it was starting to get cozy on the street. Now it looks so wide and bare. Not complaining. Especially since it was 42 F (yes, above, it doesn't get that cold here) which means some melting and certainly that will turn to ice when it freezes again. At least up to now, it's stayed below freezing and the worst we had was hard packed snow, not ice. But they've cleared the streets, so that will minimize the mess.

Taylor Branch

One of the best parts of my college education was the almost weekly appearance of prominent speakers at UCLA. For the most part these were well known people - recent Time magazine covers - and being able to see and hear, and in some cases talk to, the human beings behind the mythical characters portrayed on television, magazines, and books when a long way to making me realize that, in fact, famous, even great, people, were first of all just people. Two of the most memorable were Margeret Mead and George Wallace. Sitting on the floor around the famed anthropologist with 20 other students and talking to her was like leaving reality and entering into the magical world of books and media.

Wallace was governor of Alabama. Alabama was seething with demonstrators. Police and marchers were in daily conflict over the contradiction between the US Constitution and the Jim Crow laws of the South. The shocking images of dogs attacking, and police beatings unarmed and peaceful demonstrators were on television every night. Wallace was clearly one of the devil's emissaries. What could he possibly say or do that could change our minds? Obviously, nothing. When I got to the auditorium about an hour early - I knew it would be crowded - the first three or four rows were already filled with Black students. By the time he came to the stage, the room was packed and there was a collective tension and anticipation. I don't remember what he said, but within five minutes of taking the stage, Wallace's humor, charisma, and obvious intelligence had disarmed the audience. We laughed at his jokes and we listened to his words. We didn't agree with his beliefs about segregation, but there was obviously much more to this man than I, and I'm sure most of the audience, was prepared for. And it made it much easier to understand why the people of Alabama had elected him. It had a profound impact on how I evaluated people from then on - particularly those I only knew through the media. It began opening me to see the myths we absorb as we grow up. As any people grow up. I'd bought into all the demonizing of this man. Don't misunderstand me here, I still believe the legally sanctioned segregation was abhorrent. But I learned that human beings were much more complicated than I'd ever imagined.

So I'm pleased to say that in the last few years, the University of Alaska Anchorage has hosted far more prominent speakers on campus. Jared Dimond, Francis Collins, and Alan Lightman all gave very powerful presentations last year. While these aren't speakers of the same national prominence, they are a start. Of course today, campus speaking has become much more of a business rather than an honor and public service, with the most sought after speakers earning tens of thousands of dollars for a presentation. Nevertheless, it is still important for us to see and hear in person, the people we see on the flat screen.

In any case, tonight we heard Taylor Branch speak. He said a number of significant things. What he said about the importance of myth and stories in our culture and how they shape what we think and do goes right to the heart of my last publications. He also told stories of his childhood - how his stories shaped his knowing of the world. The black employee at his father's Dry Cleaners with whom his father had a real friendship, and how Taylor joined the two of them at Atlanta Cracker baseball games. Except that at the stadium, the employee had to sit in the colored section while he and his dad sat in the white section. How shocked he was when his father spoke at the employee's funeral, and cried. And how he somehow knew as a child that this topic of race relationships was not to be discussed. Harold Napolean talks about great silence among Alaska Natives, how the great epidemics that wiped out Alaska Native villages in the late 19th and early 20th Century were also not spoken about. Which was also true about children of holocaust survivors generally not hearing from their parents' stories. I know I never asked about what had happened to my grandparents who never got out of Germany. It was a subject that just wasn't to be raised, and I didn't until I was in my twenties.



He also talked about his battles with the academics at Princeton who discouraged him from doing his policy research summer trying to register black voters in rural Georgia, because real research was done at established institutions. And how turning in his summer diary was also frowned on, but he insisted because Washington policy and what he experienced were two totally different realities. This too resonated with how my experiences as a student in Germany and a teacher in rural Thailand taught me - experientially - what my later graduate programs didn't cover. And how, in his case, one faculty managed to help him get parts of his diary published.

And in terms of substance, he argued that there are three American myths that prevent us from seeing the important and positive legacy of the civil rights movement in the United States. Myth 1 - Race is both 'solved' and 'unsolvable.' Once the laws that specifically blocked access to equality were ended, the other actions, like Affirmative Action were too idealistic and ineffective because these things just can't be solved through government. Myth 2 - Politics failed in the 1960's, it overreached itself. Basically, that Government is bad. Myth 3 - Violence is the strength of the US. The importance and contribution of the non-violence of the civil rights movement is not understood or even seen. It's influence in the rest of the word - the non-violent overthrow of the Soviet Union and other Eastern European nations, for example - is not acknowledged.

I've paraphrased these fairly briefly, and don't do him justice here. Though I'm a firm believer that what he is calling myths and stories and narratives are, in fact, often unconscious and uncritcally believed. And when they are wrong, their basic invisibility and the taboo on challenging them, as was the case of segregation in the South, prevents us from even considering other possibilities. One example he gave was how various Southern politicians argued loudly that the only way integregation could come to the South was through violent imposition and this would never succeed. That integration would destroy the South. Branch argued that, in fact, as soon as the blight of forced legal segregation was ended, the South could join the rest of the nation. Major league sports moved into the South. Southern politicians could be considered for President (Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Bush) of the US, and the economy took off. The energy that had been spent enforcing segregation, and the suppressed potential of Black Southerners, were now available for more positve work.

City Moose

How can something as enormous as a moose become invisible in the middle of town? Well, see if you can find this one lying down in my neighbor's front yard.

Here's the moose just a few minutes before, eating snow. Well, there isn't much open water around.

But even in this enlarged picture it is almost impossible to see the moose unless you know it is there. It's the brown area between the two trees, lying down in the snow. Part is sticking out slightly to the left of the left tree.

Borat and post Borat

I think we were preparing for or gone to India when Borat first opened here. This week it's at the Bear Tooth, our favorite movie theater where you can have dinner while you eat and movies are only $3.

So after all the hype it seemed to me that Borat was Everything is Illuminated plus Candid Camera with no boundaries. It would have been hard to take all the Jew jokes if Cohen weren't Jewish. Making that a running theme, sort of gave him permission to hit on everyone else.


[Hey, I know the pics are fuzzy, but it was dark and I don't like using the flash, and here especially it would have been tacky. Anyway, you get the point of how the Bear Tooth works.]

I got to talk about it afterward at a returned peace corps volunteer party - with people who hadn't seen the film, but had heard about it. In Germany it is illegal to publicly deny the holocaust. For an American, that grates badly against my First Amendment sensitivities. Our ideology is that if your ideas are good, through open discussion they will win out. Suppressing people's thought only drives it underground. I say ideology there because I'm sure the Founding Fathers did little or no empirical study on this and we know that those who can control access to information or to dissemination media can screw up that assumption, at least in the short run. But it seems to me that neo-Nazis are alive and well in Germany despite the prohibition.

Well, Borat made me realize how much we self censor in the US. Given what I see in the movies and on tv it's hard to believe that we self censor at all. But Borat really was over the top - especially in putting down lots of different types of people. And in exposing people who agreed with his racist, sexist, and other prejudiced ranting. (Though someone said they'd seen a tv interview of the car salesman - who told him how fast he needed to drive to kill Gypsies - who said he'd actually questioned his goal of killing gypsies and finally said 30 miles an hour to shut him up after constantly being asked the question. So we don't know what people really said and what was edited. But this wasn't supposed to be a documentary, it's a made up story, so I'll allow him that much.)

The point I'm trying to get to is that it is probably better to have people say this out loud where everyone can hear it, rebut it, etc. than to repress it and send it underground. Especially in the age of Google where anyone can get to anything anyway. The key is that children get the care, attention, and education they need so they don't feel so alienated in the first place, and so their crap detectors are working well.

I know I caught myself a couple of times thinking, "I shouldn't be laughing at this," and I suspect others felt the same. And if this starts a trend of similar movies we're in serious trouble. Actually, I don't think too many people could pull something like this off. Ideally, people who watched the movie started talking about why it was both terrible for him to say all those things and also ok. Life isn't simple.



And at the party I ran into Jack Dalton.. I knew him years ago when he was a student at UAA and a waiter at the Golden Pond restaurant, a Chinese restaurant run by Charlie, who now owns Charlie's Bakery. A long article in the Anchorage Daily News recently focused on how in college he began exploring his birth parents' Alaska Native culture and how he has a flourishing business now as a Story Teller using Alaska Native themes with modern twists. He gets contracts at school districts, museums, and other venues - including private homes - all over the country.

And thanks Sunny, for hosting the party



- it was a State of the Union party and I'd thought I missed it yesterday. But she emailed me today strongly suggesting I show up. I didn't catch the hint. It turned out I'd won the grand prize by guessing how many standing ovations the president got. (That's why it was today, so she could count that as well as use of different words such as democracy, terrorist, math (Sunny teaches math)). Anyway, by her count there were 3.5 standing ovations which I guessed exactly. And the prize is pretty neat - two tickets to the Pamyua concert next Thursday.

[Hey I know these pictures aren't that sharp either, but it was fairly dark, don't like flash, etc. Sunny is the sunny one in the middle. And I figured it was ok to cut off Jack's head since you can see it in the other picture. You probably didn't even think to complain about cutting off his body from that one.]

And the baby is now here

The shower has now resulted in its natural consequence. Saturday, after the ethics forum, I went over to Alaska Regional Hospital to welcome to the world young "I". Regional is like a ghost town. Almost no one around. But I found the mother-baby wing and the birthing room, Mom, Dad, and son. And my wife had gotten there before me.



One room for the mom, an extra bed for the dad, plenty of room for them to spend the time together with the baby. We didn't have that opportunity way back when. I had to leave Joan alone at the hospital. And the baby didn't stay with her all night. The nurse came in for something, the baby was feeding, so she just said, "No problem, I'll be back later." They could have used a small fridge. And the cafeteria wasn't open on the weekend, just a Subway.

Anchorage Folk Festival

So after seeing Babel Friday afternoon and having dinner at the Saigon Pho, I did a little work in the office and then we walked over to the Wendy Williamson Auditorium to catch a bit of the Anchorage Folk Festival. This wonderful show happens for two weekends every January, plus various other shows and workshops during the week. Most of the performers are local, but they also bring up one or two guest groups from Outside. And it is all free. You can see their website by clicking on the title above.
Anyway, we got there in time to hear the Alaska Native Heritage Dancers and the guest group from Hawaii, Ho'Omalie.

There's nothing I can say that can really capture the mood and great music, so I'm adding a short video clip. Alaska Native music and dance - and there are a lot of different language groups that have different traditions and ways of making music and dancing - are not something I was used to when we arrived in Alaska. It was hard to take the first few times I heard it. I really didn't know how to listen to it. But over the years I've grown to appreciate it. No, more than that. It really reaches inside me and touches vital parts of me. I used to think that Hawaiian Natives were luckier because their music is so easy for outsiders to appreciate. But, listening to the Alaska group followed by the Hawaiian group, I found myself saying, "Wow, the Hawiaains have nothing on the Alaskans tonight."

But you can judge for yourselves. I've made a tape with some short snippets of both. (I looked carefully through the program booklet to see if there was anything about not videotaping and could find nothing. Even so, I've kept the clips short like they do on sites that let you sample music before you buy it. I'm hoping that maybe someone might want to hear more of this. Or come to this weekend's part two.



You can see the schedule of events by clicking on the title of this post and going to the Festival website. Another part I haven't mentioned is all the groups hanging around the lobby and hallways jamming. The video starts out with such a group.

Babel and Pho

Wow! Babel caught the feel of each of its locations - Southern California, Northern Mexico, Moroco, and Tokyo. OK, I haven't been to Moroco, but there was something about the camera and the editing that picked up lots of little details that said to me, "This director is seeing the world differently than most American directors." Having spent a fair amount of time in non-Western countries, I recognized these images. (And, of course Alejandro González Iñárritu isn't a United States citizen.) I knew that the film connected these different locations and perhaps the critics who didn't like the film thought the connections were too easy - the American tourists in Moroco, connected to their children left in Southern California in the care of their Mexican nanny. That doesn't spoil anything and I won't reveal the Japanese connection. The more complex, and to me more significant institutional connections were not even touched on. That would be a legitimate critique. But I doubt that was what they didn't like.

Or perhaps they thought the portrayal of the industrial world citizens too negative and the citizens of Moroco and Mexico too positive. While I suspect that some groups of tourists would have reacted better, I know that the impatient Brit on the bus has very real models. And that American tourists as wrought up as Richard (Brad Pitt) are also not uncommon. And I suspect the alienation of the Japanese school girl is also real. And the Morocan police weren't portrayed all that positively and Santiago (Gael García Bernal) certainly made some pretty bad choices. The fact that Pitt's character had no family or friends who could take the kids for a while, seemed a bit hard for me to conceive. While the mobility of Americans pulls many from their connections, it seems a family as well off and established as this family ought to have been able to call on friends or relatives. Perhaps that was the Mexican stereotype of Americans who have abandoned their kids to Mexican caregivers.

It did make the Morocans - the goat herders and the villagers where Pitt and Blanchet awaited help - into human beings. They weren't complete people, but we got past the normal stereotypes we might have had. And the Mexican wedding was something anyone in any culture could understand.


Having the Japanese girl be deaf was an unexpected extra twist, showing her own alienation not only from her Dad (who could sign), but from other Japanese.


But all in all, a film depicting the problems of communications really takes us a step closer to being able to communicate with others. This was a film with a different perspective, one that I recognize as closer to the world I see, than most Hollywood films. For that reason, I applaud it.



We talked about the film afterward over Vietnamese noodles at Pho Saigon restaurant.


I did peruse some of the reviews of the movie. Most were pretty positive and the negative ones were mostly about the gap between what was attempted and what was achieved by the film makers. But this comment on Lisa Schwartzbaum review is what I thought the negative American reviews would look like:

"This is a great movie for elitist and (properly) self-loathing white American liberals. They can sit in their comfy theatre chairs and watch Brad Pitt go through all of his cliche'd UgAm histrionics, contrasted with the Deep Nobility of the 3rd World characters and smile their self-satisfied smiles and say to themselves "How awful THOSE types of Americans behave... no wonder the rest of the world hates us !" Then they can drive home in their Prius or other socially acceptable vehicle, pick up a little Starbuck's on the way ("they DO support the environment, you know"), and revel that their sense of being "emotionally drained" at this experience of High and Culturally Sensitive Art is the stamp of legitimacy on their highly evolved Liberal Sensibilities. Truly, their emotional reaction to this formulaic drivel is proof of their Great Worldliness.
I want my 10 bucks back."

Ethics Hot Topic in Alaska these Days

Juneau Legislature studies ethics reform
LEGISLATURE: Gov. Palin releases report; lawmakers spend day in workshop.
By ANNE SUTTON
The Associated Press

Published: January 19, 2007
Last Modified: January 19, 2007 at 02:06 AM

JUNEAU -- Gov. Sarah Palin and lawmakers agree ethics reform should be addressed in this legislative session, but to what degree and by whom is already causing some divisions.
The third day of the 25th Legislature was devoted to the issue as lawmakers attended a daylong ethics workshop while the governor held a news conference to announce a report from her two-man ad hoc ethics Cabinet.
Called "Ethics White Paper," the report was penned by former U.S. Attorney Wev Shea and Ethan Berkowitz, a former House Minority Leader and Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor. [Click on the title to link to the Anchorage Daily News for the rest of this story.]

Alaska Common Ground and the League of Women Voters have been working with the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics since last May to hold two public forums (one in Anchorage and one in Juneau) using the Outside experts brought to Alaska to do the training for the legislators and for their staff. I was asked to moderate the one in Anchorage. So Friday I was doing last minute preparations - communicating with the panelists about the questions and working with Peg Tileston, director of Alaska Common Ground.

Today (Saturday) was the forum at the Anchorage Senior Center and it seemed to go off well. Our Outside expert, Butch Speer from Louisiana gave a ten minute talk that put legislative ethics into national perspective. The indictment of one of our legislators is certainly not an isolated incident. (And one of the attendees today suggested there will be more indictments here before long.) The heads of the Alaska Public Offices Committee and the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics both had ten minutes to explain what their offices do. The panelists included Butch Speer, Arlis Sturgulewski (who's had a long career of civic activity including being a State Senator), Larry Persily (editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News), Jim Liszka (an university dean who has a book on morality), and Herman Walker (a public member of the Select Committee on Legislative Ethics). Panelists did not give opening statements - it was all question and answer - and that seemed to move pretty well. Then the audience broke into groups and discussed what average citizens can do - and what they personally could do - to continue pressuring legislators to be more ethical.

Most of the attendees were people who are already pretty active in civic affairs and it would have been nice to see more younger people there. But as one participant pointed out, an answer to a story about how reporting unethical behavior is a sure way to ruin one's political career, a fairly recent whistleblower who would not go along with blatantly unethical behavior is now our governor.

Out North Independent Exposure

Since the fundraiser for Elvi was right near Out North, and it was almost 7 pm as we were leaving, we drove over, got our tickets and went in. Mike, the Director of Out North, told us they'd start when we were ready. It turned out we were the only two folks there for a Thursday night with fresh snow. We offered to take a snow check and let the projectionist and usher go home, but the usher was a volunteer and wanted to see them too, so we sat down and watched.

I wasn't all that impressed with this set of short films. There was interesting filming technique, but they seemed like assignments to show mastery of some technical skill and none really impressed me as a total film. There were a few that seemed better than others - Between You and Me - was technically neat and the story of a man interrupting a street assault and then finding the victim's digital camera on the street afterward was nice. But I think his using the pictures in the camera to track down the owner appealed the digital convert in me. Mostly it seemed pretty student film - not great student film, just better than average student films. We also need better quality projection equipment there.

But overall, just seeing the different ways people used their cameras was fun and, while the image with this post may not show it, got me thinking about things I could do. And wondering how they did the things they did in their films.

Local Elections

Wednesday night was a fundraiser for Sheila Selkregg's campaign for the Municipal Assembly. Her mother had this position when we got to Anchorage. Sheila's got great professional credentials and like her mom, she's doing this because she believes in community, in the possibility of creating a better place to live through technical skills, compassion, and imagination. There were a lot of people we hadn't seen for a while. It's great to have someone else take the time to invite people you want to catch up with.


And Thursday night was Elvi Gray-Jackson's fundraiser. I've known Elvi since the early 80's. She too is a strong, competent woman, passionately pursuing a better Anchorage. And we live in Elvi's district.