I did an earlier post of flowers and bugs we saw walking around the lake at this Alaskan State Park. It was a grey weekend with some rain and lots of mosquitoes, but a reminder why weather shouldn't affect whether you go or not. It was still much better than staying home. The campground is about mile 147 on the Parks Highway between Anchorage and Denali National Park.
This is Public Use Cabin #1 which Joe had reserved for the group. It's right near the parking lot and on the edge of the lake. A few people slept in the cabin, others in their campers, and others in tents.
The route around the lake is 4.8 miles and at this time of the year, very green and lots of flowers.
About half a mile from the parking lots, there are two more public use cabins. This one is number 3.
At the south end of the lake, a small bridge goes over the drainage out of the lake.
While things were relatively dry, there were bits of boardwalk at different points along the trail.
In fact, we were originally supposed to contribute to some other projects under construction this summer. However, the state employee who was supposed to supervise us was diverted to another project. It would have been nice to make a contribution here, on the other hand, I wasn't terribly disappointed.
For those of you reading this far from Alaska, part of me would rather you think we are always covered in ice and snow. But here are the pictures to show we even have lush fern growing along the trail.
We saw a lot of birds, though most were hard to get good pictures of. Even this one of the trumpeter swans (with four cygnets) is a bit sketchy. My favorites were the hairy woodpecker and the spruce grouse and the common loon.
We'd heard about the swans from people coming around the other way. When we were near the north end, however, we saw them swimming quickly across the lake after some canoers got too close and disturbed them.
And as we came to the suspension bridge at the north end there was a merganser. I watched it float down toward me on the bridge, but when it was under the bridge I took one quiet step. But it was enough to set it off. I think this was different from the canoers and the swans, but why? I guess because the merganser came toward me, not the other way around.
Here's that bridge.
This is NOT one of the public use cabins. It was near the end of our walk around the lake, but if you were to go clockwise from the campground, you could get to this cabin pretty quickly. [I did use photo shop to make the sign work better in the picture.]
In the evening
all the hours that weren't used
are emptied out
and the beggars are waiting to gather them up
to open them
to find the sun in each one
and teach it its beggar's name
and sing to it It is well
through the night
but each of us
has his own kingdom of pains
and has not yet found them all
and is sailing in search of them day and night
infallible undisputed unresting
filled with a dumb use
and its time
like a finger in a world without hands
Here's a spoon to savor some of more of Mervin's word jams
Wednesday night at Out North was like being in an avant garde little theater in Berlin. And yet we were here in backwater Anchorage listening to an exciting concert at OutNorth. Where can you hear music composed by two Koreans, a German, a Chinese, and a Japanese for pipa, cauyaq, gayageum, saxophone, trombone, and marimba played by musicians from China, Bethel, Anchorage, Juneau, and Canada via Fairbanks? Not just musicians, but good ones, including an international star who recently worked with Yo Yo Ma.
Wu Man is one of the most acclaimed pipa player in the world. The Wikipedia entry on pipa says this about Wu Man:
Prominent students of Lin Shicheng include Liu Guilian (刘桂莲, b. 1961), Wu Man (吴蛮, b. 1963) and Gao Hong (高虹, b. 1964). Wu, who is probably the best known pipa player internationally, received the first-ever master's degree in pipa and won China's first National Academic Competition for Chinese Instruments. She lives in San Diego, California and works extensively with Chinese, cross-cultural, new music, and jazz groups. [emphasis added]
Here's Juneau musician (how little that conveys of her bio in the program) Jocelyn Clark introducing a piece by German musician Karola Obermüller. She warned the audience not to use normal music criteria, in fact, to just attend to the sounds in space. Clark played the gayageum which the program describes as a Korean zither.
There were sounds from the marimba, then short breaks before other instruments threw out some sounds. Now I happen to enjoy music that doesn't follow our standard conceptions of music, but I did begin to ask myself, how does one determine whether this is 'good?' Later I asked several of the music professors there variations of this question - is there a difference that you could notice between a piece like this and something someone like me with almost no formal musical knowledge could produce in Garageband? One said, "Maybe, maybe not."
Another responded, "How do you know if food is good?"
[Photo from left: Wu Man holding the pipa, Jocelyn Clark, Morris Palter (marimba and other percussion), Stephen Blanchett (voice and cauyaq -Yupik frame drum), Richard Zelinsky (Sax), Christopher Sweeney (trombone).]
[Wu Man showing someone the music after the concert]
Does it even make sense to talk about good here? Some of these pieces seemed to be more experiments in sound and silence which deliberately attempted to do things that were beyond the normal rules musicians might follow. Whether the intent was to see what they could get by violating such rules or these pieces were in them and they simply had to write them even if they didn't follow standard musical expectations or something in between, I don't know. I didn't think of that question until later.
One form of good, as one of the music professors suggested, would simply be whether the musicians actually played what the composer had written. And that was another question I'd had while listening to The Oort Cloud because the composer was in the audience. You can see Yoriko Hase Kojima introducing the piece in the second photo above. Since she was there, I wanted to ask her if there were any points where she went, "Oh no, they missed that"?
And I got the chance to do that at the reception afterward. Here she is talking with Canadian born percussionist and UAF music professor Morris Palter.
She smiled at my question and said, no, they did it very well and she was very pleased with the performance. She had flown in from Tokyo and was headed back the next day.
But that begs the question of whether the piece itself is 'good.' This music forces one to confront the socially constructed nature of good. How much is good simply related to what we are used to? Asian music such as Chinese opera isn't something that most Westerners can appreciate on first hearing it. What if we had heard this sort of music all our lives? It would sound totally normal. One professor said he'd need to listen to it several times to start getting a sense of it.
Alaska composer Phil Munger was one of the people who got to sit behind the performers close enough to watch the saxophonist's music. Here he is talking to Morris Palter.
[Update July 4: Phil follows up on this post and addresses these questions about good and bad music in a long post at his blog.]
[Trombonist and UAA music professor Chrisopher Sweeney talking after the performance. Anchorage saxophonist Richard Zelinsky is behind him.]
I need to say that a number of the pieces were more traditional music - particularly Chinese classical music for pipa, such as the second Youtube of Wu Man from wumusicpipa below. Wednesday night's concert was being recorded and I hadn't asked permission beforehand to record any video so I have nothing from the concert.
The concert was a collaboration of a number of organizations. It's a little hard to put them all together from the program, but CrossSound in Juneau was one and OutNorth here in Anchorage was another. [Update: Actually there was a thank you page in the program but I missed it.] On the right is Scott Schofield, Out North's new artistic director after the performance. Preparation for the performance began just as he arrived at OutNorth. His introduction Wednesday was a pleasure to listen to. His words were good, his delivery fluent, and he effortlessly rotated to acknowledge the audience members sitting behind him on the stage. (See, there are some things I feel have some basis for evaluating.) We're lucky to have him here and I look forward to continuing great nights like Wednesday at OutNorth.
This YouTube I found of Wu Man playing with the Kronos Quartet gives a bit of the sense of what I'm talking about in terms of the more experimental music we heard, though this sounds closer to more traditional music than a couple pieces Wednesday.
I also found one that gives a sense of Wu Man playing a traditional Chinese piece.
We walked around Byers Lake in Denali State Park - partway on Saturday and all the way (4.8 miles according to the sign) on Sunday. Here are some of the flowers and bugs we saw.
Most of these are pretty common Alaskan flowers, but a couple I'm not 100% sure of. This one is a wild rose.
Unidentified moth on what I think is a Labrador tea flower
Blue bells.
This clear water showing the rocks and then the reeds is at the south end of Byers Lake from the bridge as the lake drains into a creek.
These yellow flowers always trick me. Is it a cinquefoil? A butter cup? I don't know. And I didn't get pictures of the other parts that might help with the identification. What am I even trying to do here? Plant identification isn't my main goal, but rather to take pictures that cause me (and maybe others) to look more closely at things we tend to rush by without really looking. Close ups of things we generally fail to see, so that we see them in a new light. It all fits in with the basic theme here of how we know what we know.
This is cow parsnip just opening. It's probably about the size of a cauliflower head.
And a watermelon berry flower. Later the berry, which tastes a bit like watermelon, will also hang down like this.
We see a lot of insects on the flowers which reminds me that they all work together - the bee getting food and then helping to pollinate the flowers. This bee is on cow parsnip flowers.
A wild geranium.
Another bee in a wild geranium.
And I just can't resist the iris - all painted up so outrageously.
This is a sedge ("sedges have edges") with a collection of raindrops.
Another bee - a different type I think - working on a devil's club flower. Didn't know bees had hair. I was using my macro setting, so you can see the bee wasn't at all disturbed by my getting real close. (Inches away).
Not exactly a bug or a flower, but this bear scat will fertilize the plants that have the flowers. And it probably has some plant material in it as well.
There was no shortage of mosquitoes at Byers Lake.
OK, this was back in Anchorage but it seems to fit into this series of pictures. This is cow parsnip again. The bud was full of these little black bugs. I'm assuming that this is where a lot of eggs hatched all at once. We seem to have different stages of what looks like is going to be the fly like insect below.
The trip Saturday to Denali State Park was relatively uneventful - the changes in Wasilla since we first did this route in 1978 are large, but not more so than other cities in the world since then.
Joe Miller people were waving their signs in Wasilla. And we have three more months until the primary!
Tourists were packaged in buses, trains, and RV's.
The State Troopers were pulling over speeders and our windshield was streaked from our windshield wiper.
And, of course, there was highway construction.
A patch of newly paved highway with wide shoulders.
And even some highway that looked vaguely reminiscent of the old days.
We stopped at Mile 135 to one of the worst cloud covers of Denali we've ever seen. (We've been relatively lucky at this spot over the years.) But the walk to the viewpoint at the relatively new stop was still good for our legs and a view of the Chulitna and the clouds covering Denali.
From there it was a short ride to the State Park. I'll post pictures of that in another post.
We spent a few days this weekend at Byers Lake Campground with some other returned Peace Corps volunteers from Anchorage and Fairbanks. I'll break this up into a couple of posts. This one will be short and sweet.
Here's the viewpoint at mile 135 where, on a clear day, you have the best view of Denali from the highway. But the mountain makes its own weather and most tourists never see much or anything of the mountain. I always wanted to make a post card for tourists who didn't get to see the mountain. It might look something like this one below.
The sign shows the Alaska Range's highest peaks, and the real thing is dressed in clouds.
My book club has divided David Copperfield into three parts (it's about 900 pages). So here's a thought from Charles Dickens.
David has reunited with his aunt and been placed at a new school and lives now with Mr. Wickfield. The headmaster of the school, Dr. Strong, has recently married and his wife's family has been taking advantage of his generous manner and has been imploring him to find a place for his wife's cousin. He's just asked Mr. Wickfield if there was any progress in finding him a placement.
"...What does Doctor Watts say?" he added, looking at me, and moving his head to the time of his quotation: "'Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do.'"
"Egad, Doctor," returned Mr. Wickfield, "if Doctor Watts knew mankind, he might have written, with as much truth, 'Satan finds some mischief still for busy hands to do.' The busy people achieve their full share of mischief in the world, you may rely upon it. What have the people been about who have been the busiest in getting money, and in getting power, this century or two? No mischief?"
Dickens wrote David Copperfield about 1850, but still has passages that resonate well today.
