"Might Create Jobs for $2 Billion"

Good thing I had my camera with me.  And I thought panhandling in traffic had been made illegal. 


Here's some context for non-Alaskans.   And the Governor's view.  Remember, he was a lobbyist for Conoco-Phillips before he became governor.

UAA Music Faculty Stuck (Nicely) at the B's

Four UAA music faculty - new faculty John Lutterman and Lee Wilkins, plus long time faculty [Timothy] Tony Smith and Walter Oliveras - played Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms Saturday night.  They may not be able to get past the B's or out of Germany, but they sure can make music.   [Update: Thanks, Phil, for the correction.  I knew it was Timothy. The brain works in mysterious ways.  It popped out another name that began with a T and ended with a Y.  And I was tired. Sorry Timothy.]

I always feel the need to remind readers that when it comes to music, I can't tell you much about what's going on technically and if they missed notes, I probably wouldn't notice.  I can just tell you how it affected me.  I sat for over two hours in another world.

John Lutterman, the new cellist, and (disclosure) a member of the small group of new faculty I'm working with, began by talking about his instruments.  He was holding a baroque cello, and there were two more cellos on the sides of the stage.  After each piece, he walked off the stage with a different cello.  He talked about the sound qualities of each and about the Bach cello suites which were the subject of his dissertation.  He said Bach didn't write music to publish, but more for his students, and as a starting off place for performances, which were improvisations.  His dissertation, he said, makes the argument that Bach's work was intended for improvisation.  And that's what John did.  Rather than play note for note, he approached it more like a jazz musician.  And the Bach cello suites are pieces I'm reasonably familiar with having played my Rostropovich recordings many, many times.  The deep sounds of his cello in that room were enchanting.

The trio - the piano and violin joined the cello - played Beethoven's Trio No. 5 in D major, Op. 70 #1 ("Ghost")* and it was bewitching.  It was like the three musicians were one playing three instruments.  Everything was so perfectly (to my ear) coordinated.

And then after the break, the violist joined the other three for Brahms' Piano Quartet in g minor, Op. 25*.  I keep saying it, but we're so lucky in Anchorage to be able to attend great performances in intimate theaters like the UAA recital hall.  And this hall is both visually and acoustically wonderful.  (Thanks Michael Hood.)

*That's what the program said anyway.

I know.  I know.  This sounds really gushy, but I was really into the music and so were all the people around me.

You can get an inkling of the evening in the short video sampling below.  I can't believe the sound on my tiny camera is as good as it is.  But it is only a vague impression of what we heard Saturday night. 




Sorry, I couldn't get the color quite right in the images.

Argo - Good Entertainment, But Only Better than Average Hollywood Film

I took this picture as I went into the Century theater.  After watching the window smashing in the movie Argo, it seemed to gain some relevance. 

As I walked out of the movie I was thinking I wouldn't even post about it.  What exactly did I think/feel?  I enjoyed it until the end when it seemed to me that way too many liberties were taken with the story to make it more exciting - would they or wouldn't they get out of Iran?  Close calls that I found laughably implausible.

And then among the credits were words to the effect of "Some parts fictionalized for dramatic effect."

Spoiler Alert:  This is probably a good time to stop reading if you haven't seen the movie and don't want to know too much before you go.  I'm not going to tell the story, but point out why this isn't a great movie.  In the process I'll have to talk about some scenes in detail.  By the way, I have no idea why this was rated R.  I certainly don't recall any sex scenes.  There was violence and some dead bodies, but nothing that kids don't see in the media every day.  Could it have been for the few outbursts of profanity?  [After I wrote the last few sentences I remembered that everything can be found on google and checked - you can read the reasons here.  I would just say all the issues listed were completely in context and not gratuitous.]

First.  I enjoyed the movie until the end when it got too Hollywood for me.  It offers easy history for those under 35 who weren't old enough to be aware of the events at the time.  An example of how we've all been infected by election hype: I did wonder whether the movie would be good for Obama or Romney.  The depressing answer - each side could spin it their way if they wanted.

So, what was wrong?

1.  At the end, we had a series of events within a 24 hour period, which all compounded to create a second series of extremely close calls that served to make the escape ever so much more dramatic than it really was.  (Listen to  David Edelstein's review "Too good to be true because it isn't" on Fresh Air which I heard when I got home and confirmed my reaction at the end of the movie.)

• a.  The Iranians put hundreds of little kids to work piecing together the shredded Embassy documents, including profiles of everyone working in the embassy.  Nice detail, I'm sure it happened. But it's only on the day of the escape they put together the face of one of the six at the Canadian ambassador's house who is about to leave the country with Canadian passports under the ruse they are a film crew.
• b.  The film crew is escorted through the bazaar in Tehran to scout it for the movie the day before the departure.  Each of them is surreptitiously photographed.  OK so far.  But somehow the recovered shredded picture is matched to the photo and the information gets sent to the officials checking passengers at the airport.  Remarkable efficiency and coordination.
• c.  The night before the scheduled departure, Washington DC calls Iran to cancel the project.  The CIA officer leaves the six thinking he's going to pick them up in the morning.  Overnight he decides to defy his orders and do it.  He calls his DC boss on the Canadian ambassador's safe phone, just before the Canadians smash it and the ambassador flees.  He talks just long enough to say he's doing the job and hangs up.
• d.  The DC guy he talked to realizes that the Swiss Air tickets had been cancelled and goes through a series of actions to get the White House to reauthorize the project and the tickets. 
• e.  The fake production office in Burbank is notified to shut down because the project is off.  The two Hollywood guys then get notified (this wasn't completely clear) that the project is back on, but get blocked from the office because a film is being shot between them and the office as the airport security is calling them to check if the film is real.  No one answers.  They finally walk through the shoot as the Iranian security guy tries one more time and they answer it on the 14th or 15th ring, just as he is about to hang up.  They satisfy the guard who now allows the  group to proceed to the plane.  Fortunately in the movies time zones don't matter, and it's the middle of the day in Tehran and in Burbank even though in real life when it's 8:30am in Tehran, it's 10 pm in Burbank. 
• f.  At the ticket counter the airline person finds no reservations on the computer for the group.  Flash to DC and the guy calling to reauthorize the tickets.  Flash to Tehran airport as the CIA guy asks the person to check again.  In less than half a minute, they reappear.  Alaska Airlines ticketing was down all morning last week, but in 1979, between DC, Switzerland, and Tehran, they got the tickets back online in 30 seconds.

You get the picture.  So do the Iranians - they reconstructed the shredded one and match it to the photo - and call the right people at the airport just as the group boards the bus to the waiting plane.  The guards come running after them.  The glass sliding door is locked.  They smash it with their guns.  (Cue the photo above .) And suddenly half a dozen vehicles and soldiers (how did they find all of them in those seconds?) are chasing down the runway in an attempt to stop the plane which is starting to taxi.  The CIA guy sees them out the window overtaking the plane as the pilot pulls the lever and the plane speeds down the runway and into the air.

It was just too much and too unbelievable for me.

There were lots of good parts.  The storming of the embassy seemed plausible and gave me a sense of the impending mob and the helplessness of those inside.

Starting the film with the 1953 CIA coup  that overthrew Iran's first democratically elected president and the installing of the shah gave the film a documentary feel with an un-Hollywood spin that gave serious historical context to the film.  But we forget the history lesson of Iran's hijacked budding democracy by the end of the movie and the Hollywood ending when we're rooting for the escape and the Iranians are the villains.  The ride to the bazaar with the car being jostled by the mob also gave a realistic sense of being out of control and trapped. It reminded me of scenes in The Year of Living Dangerously.  Did they actually get caught in a protest mob?  I'm guessing not.  They probably didn't go to the bazaar for a scouting trip even.  But these were at least plausible.  And I realize that in a two hour film you have to crunch a lot of events.

The two Hollywood characters - Alan Arkin and John Goodman - have great parts and do a wonderful job of taking jabs at the Hollywood culture.  Now that's something the screenwriter probably knows something about.

Edelman (the reviewer mentioned above) liked the scene where the CIA guy preps the six group members on their identities.  I thought they didn't stand a chance if there was anything more than a superficial interrogation at the airport.  But I must admit, I thought  the Farsi speaking group member's discussion of the film with the guards at the airport was cool.  They may be scary guards, but they are human beings who are impressed, like most of us are, by Hollywood.  His use of the story boards and his sound affects of alien craft was convincing.  But if I were the guard I would wonder why he spoke such good Farsi after a two day visit.  I think he was even asked about that and he said something about preparing for his trip.  But you don't get that good at a language in such a short time.  Plus - a realistic part - the guard actually did speak English, though he only spoke to them in Farsi at first.  Was he trying to cause them to think he didn't speak English and wouldn't understand them if they talked to each other?  So this good scene still had this Farsi flaw (at least for me.)

But what keeps this film, for me, from breaking out of the "run-of-the-mill Hollywood movie" bin is the shallowness of the characters portrayed.

Antonio Mendez - the CIA hero.  We know nothing about him.  That's what a CIA spy wants you to know, but it's not good for the hero of a film.  We know from phone calls to his son and a discussion with the Alan Arkin character about Arkin's character's estrangement with his family, that Mendez is a caring father.  We know nothing about why he's separated from his wife.  Or why she walks out onto the porch at the end of the movie and hugs him and  all is magically better.  What makes this man capable of risking his life and the lives of others to get American citizens out of perilous spots?  (He tells the six that he's done this before and never lost anyone.)  And how can someone savvy enough to bluff his way through post-Shah Iran be so amazed at the Hollywood producer's (Arkin again) negotiations for the rights to the film script?  What makes him so sure of himself?  What made him good enough to succeed?  We know nothing.  I was intrigued (in a creepy way) by the idea of a man leaving on a business trip for a few days to save six Americans in Iran, who comes back and can't explain to his estranged wife where he was and what he did.  Again, there's a hint here when he's told he's getting an award, but the award is top secret. 

The six Americans in the Canadian embassy.  We learn only the most elementary info about them.  We don't get under their skin at all.  Again, you can argue this was only a two hour movie.  Other movies seem to figure out how to do this.   The King's Speech was 118 minutes and we did get to know all those characters and what made them tick.  Other recent movies that gave us a lot more character depth - Milk, Capote, Broke Back Mountain, The Pianist, even Traffic.  The Iranian movie, A Separation, did a great job of getting us inside of the characters, even with subtitles.

I understand this film had a story to tell in addition to developing the characters, and the movie makers did attempt to reveal bits of the characters as part of the plot. The husband's  confession near the end that his wife had wanted to leave Iran six months earlier and he'd kept her there was probably the most revealing insight.  But for me, the characters were just that - characters in an adventure flick, just part of the plot.  Finding ways to reveal the characters as the plot unwinds is one of the ways great films distinguish themselves from good films.   For me good characters and a plausible (not merely possible) plot are essential. This was supposed to be a portrayal of a real event, not a fictional adventure movie. 

Again, I'd remind you that I did like it.  I think maybe I'm reacting to what I sense is a strong positive reaction to the film.  From Wikipedia:

Argo was acclaimed by critics.^[7] Rotten Tomatoes reported that 94% of critics gave the film positive reviews based on 140 reviews, with an average score of 8.5 out of 10. Its consensus reads: "Tense, exciting and often darkly comic, Argo recreates a historical event with vivid attention to detail and finely wrought characters."^[8]

I'm sorry,  but anyone who thinks these were 'finely wrought characters' was either in a rush to get their review out or they're not watching enough of those good television series that do have some great characters. Or maybe it's a commentary on the rest of this year's films.

I know the Toronto Film Festival is a biggie, but this film won there, in part, because Canada comes out of the movie as one of the big heroes, and even laid back Canadians like films that make them look good. 

Oh, the other thing that caused me to think about reviewing the movie was a google searcher Friday night who got to the blog looking for Iran Hostage Rescue Attempt.  They got to this photo from a trip to the Arlington National Cemetery a couple of years ago.

This was the rescue mission that ended badly. 

Sun, Snow, And Fixing Things Myself

It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday, the third in a row.  Here's a view from the University.

Although I did take my camera to the repair shop this week, I decided to try to fix my own headlight.  The manual helped me get the right bulb.  But what it looks like in the book and what it looks like under the hood are two different things.  Here's the book view:

 Here's what it actually looked like.

 It says to take off the cap that twists.  OK, I was able to figure that much out. And it's off in the picture.   But then it says to pull the wire connection out.  I could see the wires - they aren't shown in the book.  When I try to do the obvious and it doesn't work easily, I worry that I might be doing it wrong and if I try harder I might break something.  I tried to pull the wires connection, but it wasn't moving.  After looking at things several times and finding a head lamp to see it better, I just pulled that black part and it finally came out.

Then that wire thing - #2 in the picture.  Pull down, it says.  (The actual picture is looking down at the parts at issue.)  Well, after lots of head scratching I finally figured out that the wire loop at the bottom of the picture locks the light in place and it pulls out of the white part and pops open so the light can be pulled out.  Maybe figured out is the wrong term.  I played with it, and it just happened.  No real figuring on my part.  Pure trial and error.

From there it was easy.  Take the new bulb out of the package - careful not to touch the bulb itself - and pull the old one out and put the new one in.  Then reconnect the wire that holds the bulb tight.  Then reconnect the colored wires and screw on the cap.  Turn on the engine.  Turn on the lights.  Presto.  It works.

The sun shining through the windows yesterday also screamed loudly that our windows were pretty dirty.  With winter coming soon, I decided to get some of them cleaned up a bit.  A few years ago I bought a window cleaning kit with a nice gadget for scrubbing the windows, some cleaner (a spoonful per gallon), a squeegee, and a pole.  Five windows looked much better in under 30 minutes.  Only a few windows can be opened this way allowing me to clean from inside.


And just now, J called my attention to the fact that it has started to snow.

We're headed to the chamber music concert at the UAA Fine Arts building tonight.  One of the new faculty members in my group will be playing the Bach cello suite, one of my favorites.  7:30pm.  Other faculty string players will perform as well.

Mt. Ash berries with fresh snow

Camera Repairs

The door to the battery and sound card on my Canon Powershot is, well, shot.  First the part of the door that you latch closed so the camera will work, got cracked.  I managed to tape it so it stayed together.  But a short time ago, when I opened the door, it came off completely.  To be clear, there's an inside part of the latch too that's still attached. 


So I bit the bullet and took it to the Camera Repair Service shop.

I don't usually write plugs for businesses, but this is a place where I've been able to go over the years and get straight advice and help with my camera. It's a true "small business" that provides a service that the national franchise places just can't quite give. And it's easy to pass the little mall it's in on 15th, just east of C Street, and miss it completely.

(And I'm sure there's an interesting story behind the 'Norway Alaska' name of this building.)


So I asked Michael, the owner, if he wanted to say a few words about the shop.  There's a neat array of used cameras, including a Hasselblad for sale that you can see in the video.



 And here's his partner at the shop.

I'm keeping the camera until the part comes in.  I still manage to make it close enough that I can turn on the camera.  

What October's Supposed to Look Like

After abnormally rainy days, the sun slid out today, and the sky was blue.


Here's the edge of Goose Lake along the bike trail to UAA.  

 The sun made the birch trunks white, white.

Red crab apples, blue sky, and yellow leaves.  Primary colors.  Sort of.  Wikipedia refines this a bit, but I know from camera stuff that it's gotten way more complicated than this, but it's a start.

"RYB (red, yellow, and blue) is a historical set of subtractive primary colors. It is primarily used in art and art education, particularly painting.^[23] It predates modern scientific color theory.

RYB color wheel

RYB make up the primary colors in a painter's color wheel; the secondary colors VOG (violet, orange, and green) make up another triad. Triads are formed by 3 equidistant colors on a particular color wheel; neither RYB nor VOG is equidistant on a perceptually uniform color wheel, but rather have been defined to be equidistant in the RYB wheel.^[24]
Painters have long used more than three "primary" colors in their palettes—and at one point considered red, yellow, blue, and green to be the four primaries.^[25] Red, yellow, blue, and green are still widely considered the four psychological primary colors,^[26] though red, yellow, and blue are sometimes listed as the three psychological primaries,^[27] with black and white occasionally added as a fourth and fifth.^[28]
During the 18th century, as theorists became aware of Isaac Newton’s scientific experiments with light and prisms, red, yellow, and blue became the canonical primary colors—supposedly the fundamental sensory qualities that are blended in the perception of all physical colors and equally in the physical mixture of pigments or dyes. This theory became dogma, despite abundant evidence that red, yellow, and blue primaries cannot mix all other colors, and has survived in color theory to the present day.^[29]
Using red, yellow, and blue as primaries yields a relatively small gamut, in which, among other problems, colorful greens, cyans, and magentas are impossible to mix, because red, yellow, and blue are not well-spaced around a perceptually uniform color wheel. For this reason, modern three- or four-color printing processes, as well as color photography, use cyan, yellow, and magenta as primaries instead.^[30] Most painters include colors in their palettes which cannot be mixed from yellow, red, and blue paints, and thus do not fit within the RYB color model. Some who do use a three-color palette opt for the more evenly spaced cyan, yellow, and magenta used by printers, and others paint with 6 or more colors to widen their gamuts.^[31] The cyan, magenta, and yellow used in printing are sometimes known as "process blue," "process red," and "process yellow."^[32]

To really get into this from a camera perspective, check out Mark Meyers' Photo Journal post "Calculating Color Space Volumes."

 Yes, that white spot is trash at Goose Lake.  I decided not to photoshop it out. 

Do You See The Employment Glass 92.2% Full Or 7.8% Empty?

The media regularly publish the UNemployment percentage, but rarely the employment percentage.   For those among the 7.8% unemployed, the impact runs from liberating (a very few) to seriously problematic to disastrous.  And economists are quick to point out that another 20% may be underemployed.  But even 72.8% 'fully'  employed, means that a high percentage of people in the US have jobs that fit their qualifications and they receive what some would say is appropriate remuneration for their work.

My brain can't help but wonder, why those who are fully employed (or otherwise economically secure), can't be grateful for their luck in life (to be born into a family situation that led them to be suitable employee (or entrepreneurial) material, to be born at a time when getting a job was relatively easy, having an aptitude and being prepared for the kind of job that hasn't disappeared, etc.) and ready to share a reasonable portion of their economic rewards with those who have not been so lucky. 

Of course, many of the fortunate 72.8% are willing to share.  Even among the underemployed,  there are people sharing their more limited bounty.  They recognize and act on the charitable principles of most major religions to help those less fortunate.

On the other extreme (I'm assuming a continuum) are those who see such sharing of the bounty as foolish rewarding behaviors that lead to unemployment or underemployment - impracticality (ie majoring in art or history), lack of ambition (following their bliss), lack of hard work, lack of ambition.   People like Romney seem to acknowledge economic problems make getting a job hard when attacking Obama, but for the most part, their  seem to believe when people aren't working, it's somehow their fault.  

And I admit to thoughts about people I see around me whose lifestyles exceed their incomes and who then complain when disaster hits - a spouse loses a job, or they lose the spouse, or the housing or stock markets drop.  Relatively few Americans, it seems, given our levels of debt and savings - even before the economy tanked - are able to arrange their lives with the future in mind.  And there are those people who expect, when starting out, to live a lifestyle that took their parents 25 years to reach, without having to work too hard or at all.  It's tempting to ask, "Am I supposed to share from what I saved by living below my means while they spent freely?"  Yes, I identify with the ant more than the grasshopper. And I don't feel an obligation to help anyone maintain an above average lifestyle.  But I tend away from judging and lean to questions about what in their lives caused them to have these expectations and work habits and how do we create a society in which most kids are raised to be able to succeed?  (I'm leaving the definition of succeed wide open here.)

Nevertheless, if we are, as Romney proclaimed in his 47% speech, "the most prosperous nation in history," how is it that we can't take care of those who, for whatever reason, aren't able to make it in the US?  Why can't we provide minimal immediate emergency assistance now, and good schooling and childhood health care for the long run? 

I know, I know, it's complicated.  And Romney will tell us he is compassionate and his path to helping these people is by freeing the market to create jobs.  He sees the waste and inefficiency in government, but not the waste and inefficiency and inequity of the free market.  Neither is perfect.  Both can go terribly wrong.  But each needs the other as a complement, in the right balance.  And that is, perhaps, the crux of the difference between those who swing to the left and those who swing to the right - where they see the right balance.

But, I allowed this post to get hijacked.  Yes, my title focused on the the glass 92.2% full or 7.8% empty question.

But I did want to use this as an example of a recurring problem -   how we as individuals, and collectively as societies,  so often focus on the wrong thing and how that can  distort reality.  The media's constant use of the unemployment figure, instead of the employment figure is one example.

Another comes from Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature which argues that overall, violence is declining historically, but because the media focus on acts of individual and group violence, our perception is that we have become more violent.

I haven't read the book and there is criticism.  And from what I understand, he focuses on the number of people killed in relation to the total population.  That itself, may be a similar distortion.  I understand why it's important to frame things that way.  But even if killings/100,000 people is down, our increased population could mean that more people are killed than in history.  (I don't know that, I need to read more of what he writes.)

As Close As Most Americans Get to Ballet - Dan Bern on Bowling

Part of the charm of a Dan Bern concert is the chatter between songs and the rapport with the audience.  Out North is a perfect venue because it's so small - even with the extra rows in front it couldn't hold much more than 100.

From the Saturday night concert, here's Dan on bowling.

Questions or Answers? Which is More Important?

A day in the park is a story about a character who collects questions and one who collects answers.  They disagree on which is most important.  Brings up some interesting ideas.  There were lots of good panels, but I thought this one the best.

I think it speaks for itself.  The page is perhaps a bit too long, but there are lots of other gems in the debate between the question collector and the answer collector. 


Meanwhile Sunday was a heavy grey wetness. 

Dan Bern, My Favorite Songwriter/Singer, Packs Out North Friday Night

As I've said in previous posts this week, I first experienced Dan Bern performing in 1997 at Loussac library.  He blew me away. 

He carries on the tradition of Gutherie and Dylan's songs that commented on the state of the world.  Long narratives in a singing style that . . . well the first time I heard him, he came out and sang, then stopped, and said something like, "Some people say I sound like Dylan . . . but  you don't do you?" with a big grin on his face.

What struck me then was how his songs started with  unexpected premises and then wandered through a stream of conscious jumping from topic to topic, all the while telling the story.  Not unlike some of my blog posts.   "If Marilyn Monroe had married Henry Miller" for example.  These are sophisticated musical musings that are funny, thought provoking and musically seductive.  Sure, everyone knows who Marilyn Monroe is, but you also have to know who Henry Miller was and that Marilyn Monroe was married for a while to Arthur Miller (and who he was).

The Wasteland, one of my favorites from early on, wraps up the dilemmas of an age in evocative words and music that starkly express the darker side of American dream.  It starts:

Wasteland

Sound Clip

I saw the best of my generation playing pinball
Make-up on, all caked up 
Looking like some kind of china doll
With all of Adolf Hitler's moves down cold
As they stood up in front 
Of a rock and roll band
And always moving upward and ever upward
To this gentle golden promised land
With the smartest of them all 
Moonlighting as a word processor
And the strongest of them all 
Checking IDs outside a saloon
And the prettiest of all 
Taking off her clothes
In front of men 
Whose eyes look like they were in some little hick town 
Near Omaha 
Watching the police chief 
Run his car off the side of a bridge

 

He just tells the story and let's the audience work out what it means.

He also has a lot of baseball songs - including one about Pete Rose, the Hall of Fame, and betting, and another one I heard the first time Friday on Armando Gallarraga's perfect game stolen by umpire Jim Joyce's bad call on what should have been the last out.  Another on the golden voice of Vin Scully. 


 These photos were taken at Friday night's concert.  The purple shirt was before the break. 

Patrick McCormick stood in for his Dad Mike, the founder of Whistling Song productions which has been bringing up folkish musicians to Anchorage for a long time.  Mike's knowledge of music and hospitality has been the main reason we've had so many good musicians playing here.  Many, like Dan, have stayed at the McCormick's house when they were here.  Dan's talked about it being a wonderful change from most tour stops, being able to stay with a family.  And he's watched Patric grow up over the years he's been coming to Anchorage.   Patrick told a story about Dan coming to one of his basketball games when he was in the third grade. 

Having spent a good part of the week at the songwriting workshop and two concerts, I've got lots more to write and not enough time.  Rather than write one long, long post that won't get up til Wednesday or Thursday, let me stop here and I'll add more later.