Monday Odds and Ends (posted Tuesday)

After a couple of long posts, I get to do a short one. Just a few shots from yesterday. After class, I stopped at the UAA library to get the Levi-Strauss books and ran into this old friend. I got to see this Steven Gordon painting everyday when my office was in the library building in with ISER. That was before the library was expanded. It was nice to see it again - still in the library building. Gordon manages to capture the look and feel of the trees here. I mean, it's just a bunch of trees, right? No, it's much, much more than that. (I thought about cropping the chair out of the picture. It really messes up the balance badly. But, it's part of the environment of the picture now. And this is supposed to be a fast post.)

Then back home with my treasures. It was gratifying to see that I'm not the only one still using my bike. While I'm not riding with the frequency of the summer, at least to the University and back isn't too far and the paths are well maintained. I was also glad to see in the ADN yesterday that the city has put up new bike racks. I'm curious to see what they got. Not all bike racks are equal. Some are almost impossible to use, but the ones here are good. It says $17,000 for 13 bike racks, which sounds steep. But each rack should accommodate 5-10 bikes which would come to $130-$260 per bike space. It also included two bike boxes - I saw some of those in Portland - which I'm sure are much more expensive. But, compared to car parking spaces, it's a great deal. And if bikers had better spaces to ride (the trails are nice, but only if they go where you are going, and the ones along the streets can be pretty bumpy) and safely lock their bikes, more people would bike, even in winter.

Then we needed a Thai fix, and ran into our mayor, whose suspense over the election might end today. He was picking up take out with his son at the Thai Kitchen. Of course, he can't do this without talking to everyone. I wonder how long it will take, if all goes well, for everyone in DC to know who he is too. A little more time than it took Sarah I'm sure.

Claude Lévi-Strauss One Hundredth Birthday - Post 1

[All the Lévi-Strauss Birthday posts are here.]

I first read a book by Levi-Strauss as a doctoral student. It wasn't something assigned; I'm not sure how or why I picked it up. It was about going to Brazil. I was enchanted. I haven't gotten around to reading more about him, but he's always had a favored spot in my mind. So I was more than a little excited when I did the Famous People Born in 1908 post last January discovered that he was still alive. I wanted to do some posts in honor of his birthday - which will be a week from Friday on November 28. But I don't know all that much. So, finally, today, I stopped at the library and checked out seven books on or by Levi-Strauss. I'm hoping to do some cramming in the next ten days and to share some quotes here each day. Note, since I'm working from books and not the web, I'll put in citations for people who want to find the original. (I'll try to see if I can also find some of this online.)

What I'm discovering though, is that Levi-Strauss does not do sound-bites. What he's writing about is very complex, and he doesn't simplify it. So I felt a little better when I read, from Edmund Leach

The outstanding characteristic of his writing, whether in French or in English, is that it is difficult to understand; his sociological theories combine baffling complexity with overwhelming erudition. (Leach, 1977, p. 3)

Actually, I think that exaggerates it somewhat, but I try to put up quotes here that are reasonably easy to understand. Levi-Strauss, it seems to me, is complex, and has lots of caveats, simply because it is extremely easy to take things he says out of context. So he's constantly making sure that the reader isn't doing that. For example:

The way of thinking among people we call, usually and wrongly, 'primitive' - let's describe them rather as 'without writing,' because I think this is really the discriminatory factor between them and us - has been interpreted in two different fashions, both of which in my opinion were equally wrong. (Levi-Strauss, 1979, p. 15)

I have to admit to being guilty to doing much the same thing in this blog - lots of asides to expalin how what I'm writing might be taken wrong and how I really intend it. And also lots of qualifications, such as 'in my opinion'. Some would say, 'well of course it is just your opinion,' but if I don't write it, others will jump to conclusions that I'm stating a 'truth.' So, I take comfort in Levi-Strauss' writing.

So for the next week I'll try to write a little bit about what I'm discovering in the books. Today I really want to start with Levi-Strauss' own words. One book, Myth and Meaning, is from a series of radio talks Levi-Strauss gave in December 1977 on CBS. (As I'm writing this I'm going to Google this and see if the audio is available. Answer: Not found easily.) The table of contents is a series of questions that are addressed in each chapter. From Chapter 2:

There are those who say that the thinking of so-called primitive people is inferior to scientific thinking. They say that it is inferior, not because of a matter of style, but because, scientifically speaking, it is wrong. How would you compare 'primitive' thought with 'scientific' thought?

Claude Levi-Strauss responds (somewhat abridged):

He starts this section with the quote immediately above. He then goes on to describe the two fashions. Malinowski felt that:

The thought of all the populations without writing which are the subject matter of anthropology was entirely, or is, determined by the basic needs of life. If you know that a people, whoever they are, is determined by the bare necessities of living - finding subsistence, satisfying the sexual drives, and so on - then you can explain their social institutions, their beliefs, their mythology, and the like. This very widespread conception in anthropology generally goes under the name of functionalism.

The other fashion is not so much that theirs is an inferior kind of thought, but a fundamentally different kind of thought. This approach is exemplified by the work of Lévy-Bruhl, who considered that the basic difference between 'primitive' thought - I always put the word 'primitive' within quotes - and modern thought is that the first is entirely determined by emotion and mystic representations. Whereas Malinowski's is a utilitarian conception, the other is an emotional or affective concpetion; and what I have tried to emphasize is that actually the thought of people without writing, is or can be in many instances, on the one hand, disinterested - and this is a difference in relation to Malinowski - and, on the other hand, intellectual - a difference in relation to Lévy-Bruhl.

He's going to explain what he means by disinterested and intellectual soon.

What I tried to show in Totemism and in The Savage Mind, for instance, is that these people whom we usually consider as completely subservient to the need of not starving, of continuing able just to subsist in very harsh material conditions, are perfectly capable of disinterested thinking; that is, they are moved by a need or a desire to understand the world around them, its nature and their society. On the other hand, to achieve that end, they proceed by intellectual means, exactly as a philosopher, or even to some extent a scientist, can and would do.

Hey, I found this online - I don't have to keep typing this. SMILING.

This is my basic hypothesis. I would like to dispel a misunderstanding right away. To say that a way of thinking is disinterested and that it is an intellectual way of thinking does not mean at all that it is equal to scientific thinking. Of course, it remains different in one a way, and inferior in another way. It remains different because its aim is to reach by the shortest possible means a general understanding of the universe —and not only a general but a total understanding. That is, it is a way of thinking which must imply that if you don’t understand everything, you don’t explain anything. This is entirely in contradiction to what scientific thinking does, which is to proceed step by step, trying to give explanations for very limited phenomena, and then going on to other kinds of phenomena, and so on. As Descartes had already said, scientific thinking aimed to divide the difficulty into as many parts as were necessary in order to solve it So this totalitarian [I think holistic would be a better word since totalitarian has another connotation] ambition of the savage mind is quite different from the procedures of scientific thinking. Of course, the great difference is that this ambition does not succeed. We are able, through scientific thinking, to achieve mastery over nature—I don’t need to elaborate that point, it is obvious enough—while, of course, myth is unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment. However, it gives man, very importantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe. It is, of course, only an illusion.

So, what I understand this to mean is that people without writing think the same way as people with writing. But rather than attempting to understanding the world by breaking it up into smaller and smaller parts which they can study, the people without writing develop holistic myths that explain and help them understand the universe. It's the same type of thinking, but focused on a macro explanation rather than micro explanations. I'm not sure I buy this completely that it is the same type of thinking, but I agree that it is certainly as sophisticated.

He goes on to talk about using different parts of the brain. This is easier to understand.

We should note, however, that as scientific thinkers we use a very limited amount of our mental power. We use what is needed by our profession, our trade, or the particular situation in which we are involved at the moment...

Today we use less and we use more of our mental capacity than we did in the past; And it is not exactly the same kind of mental capacity as it was either. For example, we use considerablyless of our sensory perceptions. It seems that there was a particular tribe which was able to see the planet Venus in full daylight, something which to me would be utterly impossible and incredible. I put the question to professional astronomers; they told me, of course, that we don't but, nevertheless, when we know the amount of light emitted by the planet Venus in full daylight, it was not absolutely inconceivable that some people could. Later on I looked into old treatises on navigation belonging to our own civilization and it seems that sailors of old were perfectly able to see the planet in full daylight. Probably we could still do so if we had a trained eye.

It is exactly the same with our knowledge about plants or animals. People who are without writing have a fantastically precise knoweldge of their environment and all their resources. All these things we have lost, but we did not lose them for nothing; we are now able to drive an automobile without being crushed at each moment, for example, or in the evening to turn our our television or radio. This implies a training of mental capacities which 'primitive' peoples don't have because they don't need them. I feel that, with the potential they have, they could have changed the quality of their mind, but it would not be needed for the kind of life and relationship to nature that they have. You cannot develop all the mental capacities belonging to mankind all at once. You can only use a small sector, and this sector is not the same according to the culture. That is all.

Actually, he keeps going. You can read more at this link to Myth and Meaning.

Levi-Strauss, Claude (1979) Myth and Meaning, New York: Schocken Books (also the link above)
Leach, Edmund (1970) Claude Levi-Strauss, New York: The Viking Press

Intimate Partner Violence at the Opera

We went to Carmen this afternoon. The Discovery Theater at the Performing Arts Center is a wonderful space. Acoustics are good and no one is too far from the action.

But I have to say, that since being on a steering committee for the prevention of intimate partner violence I see things I probably would have glossed over in the past. Here's an opera about a woman who makes sport out of seducing men. Except Don Jose becomes infatuated and when Carmen is over him, he becomes obsessed.

Certainly others must have made the connection between Carmen and Domestic Violence. Or so you'd think. But Google doesn't reveal many who have done much about it. The first ten pages of Google hits for Carmen+Domestic Violence show us a lot of women named Carmen who were the victims of domestic violence, with a few more who work in that field. There was only one hit (on page 2) related to the opera. The Syracuse opera had a discussion with one of their performances of Carmen:

If you think you’ve seen Carmen in all her blazing persona, wait until you experience this more intimate version of Bizet’s famous opera by Peter Brook, the provocative English theatre and film director. Designed to intensify the psychological state of Carmen, Brook’s adaptation (with Marius Constant and Jean-Claude Carrière) focuses solely on the three main characters: Carmen, Don Jose, Micaela. The New York Times called Brook’s innovative version of Carmen “a raw, brutal tale of mutual self destruction that’s fueled by both lust and existential bloodlust – and is as deadly for others as it is for themselves.”

Syracuse Opera's LIVING OPERA series in collaboration with VERA HOUSE and the Redhouse Arts Center present:

RED FLAGS

A FREE insider's look into La Tragédie de Carmen and its parallels to modern day domestic violence issues

•Spot the 'red flags' of potential domestic violence issues in relationships•
•Explore the 'good girl vs. bad girl' stereotype and its effect on violence towards women•

Join us as we discuss the contemporary issues being brought to light by this raw, brutal electrifying opera.

Panel Speakers include: Stage director Jeffrey Tangeman, Syracuse Opera's Director of Music Douglas Kinney Frost, and Radio Host and Vera House [A Domestic Violence intervention and prevention organization] Advocate Elisa Morales.

Adding 'opera' to the search terms narrows things down a lot. We get a booklist from the Boston Public Library to prepare for the Boston Lyric Opera's performance of Carment that includes:

Sex! Violence! Bullfights! Smoking! Great music!
Georges Bizet's Carmen is one of the world's best-loved operas. It tells the story of the Spanish gypsy girl, Carmen who took love all too lightly. From the opening of the opera in front of a cigarette factory to the dramatic conclusion of the story in front of the bullring, very little of human emotion remains unsung. This booklist is designed for the opera-lover and the opera-neophyte in celebration of Boston Lyric Opera's "Carmen on the Common" and its preview performances at the Boston Public Library.

Defending Our Lives: Getting Away from Domestic Violence & Staying Safe by Susan Murphy-Milano
A resource which offers step-by-step plans for leaving abusive relationships

In How to Stop Elder Abuse Anne Hart writes:





I don't really know if the Discovery Theater has a cloak room, but from this jumble of coats during intermission, it would appear other people don't know about it if there is one. I'd pay a dollar not to have to sit on my coat.

Anyway, after about 30 minutes of Googling, I've really only found the one opera company - in Syracuse - that seems to have done anything about using Carmen as a way to educate opera goers about intimate partner and domestic violence.

I think that every domestic violence intervention and prevention agency in communities that have opera should get in touch with their opera companies and begin working now to collaborate with them on any production of Carmen. I'm embarrassed I didn't think about it here in Anchroage. There can be a page or two in the program. There can be before or after performance discussions. I can't imagine an opera company that could, politically, turn down such a request. Syracuse seems to have a model that can be used as a starting point.

There's no reason to stop performing Carmen, but it is important to use such performances to raise people's consciousness of domestic and intimate partner violence and how to work to prevent it.

When was the last time you rode a bus?

That's a paraphrase of the headline on a NY Times opinion piece today. I wonder how many people who don't have to ride a bus in Anchorage - or wherever you are reading this - have actually been on a bus in the last year? So, if you have a car, when was the last time you took a bus? If you haven't taken a bus, why not?

I think about all the students and faculty and staff at the University of Alaska Anchorage (UAA) whose University ID card is a free bus pass. How many of you have ridden the bus? For you it's free for crying out loud!

Gas prices have been up to unheard of heights, parking at UAA is a pain, and there's the People Mover right there - free for UAA people - and most don't even consider it an option. I know, there are good excuses. It takes too long. It doesn't go where I want, when I want. And on and on. Here are some tips:

1. Check the on-line Route Generator.

You just put in where you are and where you want to go etc. and it tells you what bus to catch, where, and when.
2. Each bus stop has the times buses are due and a list of main stops.
3. Buses rarely if ever come by early. My experience is that they are generally 2-10 minutes late (the further from the starting point and the more traffic the later they are.)
4. Just going to a bus stop to catch a bus can be a hit and miss thing. More miss than hit. If you don't use the bus regularly, you don't know the routes. Plus there are times of the day when it may be an hour wait for the next bus. It makes much more sense to check the schedules so you don't have to wait long.
5. Take a book or i-Pod and enjoy the free time to catch up on something you want to read or hear.
6. During summer, try biking to the nearest bus stop - after checking the schedule - putting your bike on the rack and riding the bus somewhere and then biking home.

Public transportation is one of those situations where low demand makes for low service which in turn decreases the demand. But if more people use it, it becomes more cost-efficient to have more frequent service, which makes it more convenient to use it.

But first the People Mover has to get people to change their mental images of the bus, to recognize that it is an alternative to the car for getting from here to there. I challenge everyone in Anchorage who reads this to take the bus one day for at least one ride. Then report back here about how it went.

Oh, yeah, the NY Times piece by Robert Goodman was interesting too. Here's the beginning.

THE federal government is giving General Motors, Ford and Chrysler $25 billion in low-interest loans, and the companies are asking for up to $25 billion more. These same companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying against federal fuel-economy standards and are suing to overturn the emissions standards imposed by California and other states. In exchange for the loans, Congress should first insist that the automakers stop fighting these standards. But it should also make sure that better outcomes will result from these billions than just fuel-efficient cars.

The rest of the article is here.

Intertribal Gathering at Alaska Native Heritage Center

After the Prop 8 protest Saturday, we went to the Intertribal Gathering at the Alaska Native Heritage Center. Most of the attention was focused on the dancing. We saw a little bit of Alaska dancing, but there were tribal groups from the rest of the Lower 48, and even a local Irish tribe.



Of course you need to hear the drumming and see the movement to get even a tiny sense of what it was like.

The little kids were raptly watching the Irish dancing.

Then J wanted to go through the display hall to see the beading demonstrations.

Anchorage International Film Festival Selections Available

The 2008 Anchorage International Film Festival (AIFF) selections have been posted on the AIFF website. You could keep pretty busy December 5-14 just watching movies. Here's a list of the selected features:

FEATURE FILMS
Butterfly Dreaming • Director Rufus Williams • 84 Min. Seattle/Australia

Bart Got a Room • Director Brian Hecker • 80 min. USA

Carrot Cake Conversations • Director Michael Wang • 97 min. Singapore

Chronic Town • Director Tom Hines • 94 min. Alaska/USA

Coyote • Director Brian Peterson • 95 min. USA

Half-life • Director Jennifer Phang • 116 min. USA

How to Be • Director Oliver Irving • 85 min. England/UK

Jar City (MYRIN) • Director Baltasar Kormakur • 93 min. Iceland

Moon And Other Lovers (Der Mond und Andere Liebhaber) • Director Bernard Bohlich • 102 min. Germany

Offside • Director Joffre Silva • 82 min. Brazil

The Project • Director Ryan Piotrowicz • 82 mins. USA/NYC

Resurrection County • Director Matt Zettell • USA

Skid Marks • Writter Don Rearden • 85 min. • USA

Sky in December (Jyunigatu no Sora) • Director Hiroshi Toda • 83 min. Japan

Streetsweeper • Director Neil Mansfield • 72 min. Australia

Vanaja • Director Rajnesh Domalpalli • 111 min. India

The Festival website itself has all the rest (about 150 films total) including about 40 animated films. This is a great chance to see interesting movies (and a few duds) before the rest of the world gets to see them. And in many cases you can talk to the director and other members of the cast and crew.

Last year's entry, Taxi to the Dark Side, went on to be the Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary. To whet your appetite the 2007 AIFF's best feature - The Clown and the Führer - can be seen on YouTube. [Whoops, it's just the trailer. I thought it was strange to have the whole, but I read 1:42 as an hour and 42 minutes.]

Anchorage, Alaska Prop 8 Protest

We went to lend our support to today's protest. Everyone was polite and friendly. I went up into the new parking garage to take this picture. Another man was there also taking a picture. I said I counted about 70 people, two more including us. He said, "I can't be there. I'm a teacher. I just can't risk it." Wow. We aren't just talking marriage here. I hope he's being overly cautious. He knows he has legal rights, but "people can make my life miserable." His partner did join the crowd, but he's retired. So, while I think it probably is overkill, I've tried to cut out or blur any faces that might otherwise be recognizable. I think the people there were willing to have their pictures here, but I didn't get a chance to ask everyone. (If you'd like your face visible, go to my profile and email me. Any obviously visible face is with permission of the person.)

News people are the exception to the blur rule.

After marching through downtown this way and that way, the group stopped for a picture at city hall. Then went on marching further. We were getting hungry so we slipped into the Teriyaki Box for some noodles.
Then we headed back to the car and off to the Native Heritage Center open house. As we got back to the Atwood Building, the sky was opening up a bit.

[Update: someone posted more pictures at Northernvisions.]

More Class Poster Fixer Uppers

I posted earlier about our assignment to take a poster from the Art Building bulletin board and jazz it up a bit. Here are a couple more examples. I bet you can tell which were the originals and which were the student remakes.

View from Lake Otis and Providence Friday Afternoon

La Nostalgia Re-Mix: Best Hits and Out takes for an imaginary bar Guillermo Gomez-Peňa & James Luna

Out North had one of its culturally challenging nights. By that I mean, I had to stretch a bit, I had to think about where I was on the continuum between insider and outsider, between supporter of the status quo and challenger. Between comfortable and on the edge.

The bleacher seats were facing each other with a small stage on either end. We ended up sitting right in front of James Luna's bar as often violent black and white video splashed on a screen to our left to a varying playlist. On the other end of the field - it felt more like a field than a stage, I thought of ball court at Chichen Itza - was Guillermo Gomez-Peňa, in a feather headress. I snapped the picture quickly before the performance officially began.

And we watched the ball bounce from one side of the field to the other as the artists alternated short vignettes from their side of the stage. Luna took us, on his turns, into his life as an artist and Indian challenging the world's stereotypes. His first piece was about an early performance piece at a museum where he, in the Indian exhibit, with a lot of his own memorabilia, lay flat on his back in a loin cloth, on a bed of sand in an open display case as the unsuspecting museum goers came into his hall. We saw photos of the event as he lay flat on his back in a loin cloth at Out North telling us about the experience.


Then, we shifted our attention to stage left, where Peňa read his outsider artist manifesto. The most startling piece was when audience members were brought up to him and given a machine gun and asked to pose with him, dressed as a terrorist, and they holding the gun on him - to his head first, to his chest, genitals, mouth,etc. They held the pose for - I really don't know how long, I didn't time it, but it was a long pose. Maybe a minute, maybe two. These were the stereotypical television images of the terrorist being menaced with a gun touching his body by a soldier. Seeing the image, held for a long time, right there in front of us, was very powerful. It also forced me to think about whether I would agree to participate in that event if asked. (No.)

This was a thought provoking evening with people whose authentic voice most of us never hear. There will be a performance Saturday night November 15 and Sunday afternoon November 16. Getting performances like this in the tiny Out North theater means you are right there, almost on stage. No need to bring your opera glasses. There were no empty seats that I saw tonight. You can save $2 a ticket buying them online.