The winter solstice is due Dec 21 at 8:47 AM Alaska Standard Time this year according to timeanddate.com. Monday morning. Two years ago I did a post on Jean Meeus whose calculations we use to determine the solstice. We got here fast this year and by Wednesday we'll start gaining light each day. I took the picture above on Friday. The sun doesn't rise high over the horizon, but it's out almost five an a half hours.
I had a meeting at UAA on Thursday, and while it had snowed a bit overnight, I still wanted to bike over. They tend to keep the bike trails well plowed on campus.
A little bit of sun was out Thursday as well as you can see in this picture from Rasmuson Hall. The ice fogged trees are still completely and spectacularly white.
And here's a common winter problem. The bike trail was cleared fairly quickly, but as the snow plows repeat their plowing of main streets get they push the snow in the bike and pedestrian paths.
I'll try to get some of the leftover videos, photos, and thoughts about the film festival up as I can. I talked to Vincent: A Life In Color director Jennifer Burns (and to Vincent) before their film was shown. Here's a bit of the Q&A after the Sunday showing of the film.
This was a quirky film - about a quirky person, Vincent, who stands on a downtown Chicago bridge wearing brightly colored suits waving at the tour boats on the Chicago River.
Burns took a local character whom many people knew about - he's also a regular on some Chicago radio and one of the tv shows - and then reveals, layer by layer, a life most of us would otherwise never have a chance to know. It's a stereotype breaker as I saw my initial hypotheses about Vincent shattered and a completely different story unfold. Having Vincent come along to Anchorage, wearing his amazing suits (I think he said he brought five or six suits along), was an extra bonus.
This film is a definite demonstration that different from the norm is NOT less than the norm. This was Jennifer's first film and I think it would be a better film by cutting about 20 minutes. The people discussing Vincent's past should pretty much stay, but some of the people speculating about Vincent's present life got a bit repetitive. But overall, it was an interesting view of humanity, not someone you meet every day.
We got invited to see Avatar tonight. Fortunately he'd bought the tickets much earlier and got us to the Century 45 minutes before the show.
The line started at theater 9 then snaked out to the hallway at the end
Then it went down to the end of the hallway and back the other side. But we got in fine.
And here's the line already for the 11:30 pm showing.
It's late, I'm tired. I loved the visual effects and the spectacular flora and fauna of the world of Pandora. The story was a space age variation of the Dances With Wolves theme, but much more simplistic. Corporation comes to indigenous peoples' land, wants them to move to get the minerals beneath their sacred site, sends in scientists to convince them to move out of the way. The world they created had a vaguely underwater look, the inhabitants were cool.
I wonder how many people who root for the hero (who abandons the human mission to join with the native people - that's not really a spoiler, you can't help but know it's coming), will be able to recognize the villains as the US troops gaining territory around the world to protect US corporations claim to the minerals. Or the similarity to what the Europeans did to the original inhabitants of North (and South for that matter) America. And the three-D was also fun.
After the awards ceremony Sunday night, I caught Stu Maddux, director of Trip to Hell and Back, Robyn Bliley, director of Circus Rosaire, and Jennifer Burns, director of Vincent: A Life of Color in the Bear Tooth. Given that they'd each been to a number of other film festivals, I asked them how the Anchorage International Film Festival could be improved. They told me what they liked, but I got the sense they didn't want to direct any criticism toward the festival.
They all were very pleased with how well they were treated by the festival. You can hear what they said:
The winners of the best Documentary and best Feature get shown today, then the festival closes up til next year. But I do suspect it will be hard to get in, so go early. I haven't seen Paddle to Seattle yet - a long kayak trip that people really enjoyed. And Hipsters is a fun musical that will change your mind about Russian cinema and keep your feet tapping. BEAR TOOTH.
I see a lot more people riding their bikes this winter and I like to point that out whenever I can in hopes that others might realize that bike commuting is doable, even in the winter. It helps if the distance isn't too far as is the case of this biker I saw when I was clearing the snow from the driveway on Tuesday.
We're sitting out tonight. It's all stuff we've seen and we need a break. But here's a comment from a festival passholder on Point Traverse, a film I missed. It actually had its world premiere here Saturday night and I got to talk to the film maker, Albert Shin, Monday night as he was getting ready to fly back to Toronto. You can see my short video of Albert here. Lewis said he liked the film, so I asked him to tell me why.
I also found this comment on the ADN website that echoed my thoughts about the best feature.
While admittedly, Hipsters was great, I thought the best film of the AIFF was Birthday. Birthday was completely robbed! Hipsters seemed like a big Hollywood-Moscowood- Bollywood blockbuster complete with a reported $22 million budget!
Birthday, on the other hand, was shockingly raw and intimate; the kind of film that film festivals exist for. Birthday pulled off what makes movies truly "worth freezing for". The suspension of reality and boundaries and masks for 104 minutes.
It's a shame Birthday didn't even get 2nd place or at least an honorable mention. Hopefully, the film will receive the recognition it deserves at another festival somewhere. Unfortunately, AIFF snubbed it and in so doing...snubbed Anchorage.
I don't know that they 'snubbed' Birthday as much as chose other films. Hipsters, Bomber, and Son of the Sunshine, were all good films. Different people will differ on which was best. But I think Willie's comments about Birthday being special and being a perfect festival film are right on the mark. It was my pick too for best film.
On Dec. 14, Thaivisa had a story about Thailand blocking US websites:
The Ministry of Information and Communication Technology is today blocking websites hosted in USA.
Example of blocked sites as of this morning: edition.cnn.com, facebook.com, finance.yahoo.com, flickr.com
MICT is redirecting the blocked traffic to their website http://mict.go.th, and instead showing a portrait of HM the King of Thailand together with well wishes for His Majesty's birthday.
Depending on the ISP some users do not face the reported problems. Discussion here: Internet forum branch
Using proxy servers and trying to circumvent government blocked websites is a criminal offense in Thailand.
Today (Dec. 16 Thailand time) Thai Visa posted this announcement about broadband:
CAT Telecom will today open the Asia-America Gateway it has jointly built up with other 18 leading telecom parties. The gateway is a high-bandwidth fibre-optic submarine cable system that connects Southeast Asia to the United States.
Internet users throughout Asia should start to see a dramatic increase in internet speed for websites located outside of the region when the $US550 million Asia-America Gateway (AAG) comes into operation today.
The new 20,000km (about 12,400 miles) AAG - an optical fibre cable network stretching from Malaysia to the West Coast of America via Guam and Hawaii - is now open, according to CAT Telecom.
