50 Years Since UCLA Bruins Won Their First Basketball Championship

My first semester at UCLA, Spring 1963 (yes, back then you can start school and graduate in the mid-semester, not just June).  I remember watching the basketball championships on a big tv screen in the student union.  UCLA lost somewhere well before the championship game.

But the next semester, things were different.  Walt Hazard, Gail Goodrich, Fred Slaughter,  Keith Erickson, Kenny Washington started off with a bang.  They won their first few games and then there was the LA championship (I don't recall the exact title of the tournament) at the Sports Arena.  They were playing Michigan, a traditionally good team.  A friend in LA had a boyfriend from Michigan who told us UCLA hadn't played any real teams and when they played Michigan, the winning streak would be over.  I just recall the first four minutes of the game, where UCLA put its full court press on display for the first time that I think it really got noticed.  At the end of four minutes it was 16-0 UCLA and they went on to win 30 games that season with no losses.

Every game was a nail biter as we wondered if they could extend their winning streak, which they did into the final game against Duke.

This all came back to me in January when I was cleaning things out in my mom's garage and ran across my copy of the mid-March 1964 Sports Illustrated with the cover story on UCLA's win.  I decided to wait until March to post it, but it seems, the picture I took is on an older sound card and the magazine is back home in Anchorage now.  But this is the time, so I'll put the picture up when we get back to Anchorage.

[UPDATE:   I posted the cover and the article here on the exact 50th anniversary of the Sports Illustrated date.]

A couple years later I remember watching the Freshman team with the new recruit Lew Alcindor, play the national champion varsity team and win.  A sign of even more championships to come.

UCLA basketball and football helped me understand the power of group spirit (and insanity), as the whole school, it seemed, had its spirit lifted and dashed if the team won or lost.  I got over that after I graduated, though at times in my rural Thailand town, I could listen to UCLA basketball games late at night coming via the Armed Forces Network in Saigon. 

Visiting My Chinese Grandson And His Grandmother

D was a student of mine in Hong Kong 20 some years ago and helped me with research in Beijing.  My family attended his wedding in Beijing and he's been to visit us a number of times in Alaska and now he's a college professor himself, doing very well. He's like a third child for us. 



So in addition to visiting our other son here in the San Francisco area, we're here to visit our new 6 week old grandson, J.  A special bonus is that J's biological grandmother is here from Beijing, where we last saw her ten years ago.

D stopped at a Chinese grocery on the way home.  Lots of interesting food available.

The fish department announced itself to my nose as soon as we got inside.  Lots of fish, live and not.  Turtles and fat frogs too.

And disappointingly, for an Alaskan, is this package of farmed Canadian salmon. 

Lots of great fruits and vegetables and fungi.  The jackfruit on the left is an old reminder of Thailand where it is common and strangely grows from the trunk of the tree. 

For dinner, J's grandmother made Jiao Zi (dumplings) from scratch.  First the dough, then she cut the little round dough pieces and flattened them for wrappers, the filling, and then she boiled them.  Delicious.





Mind your stereotypes here.  While it's easy to see a quaint older woman, with limited English, visiting from China to help with her new grandson, this is actually a retired physics professor who is also an accomplished artist.   


As we walked around the block with J and tried to retrieve our meager Chinese vocabulary, we traded English and Chinese words for the flowers we saw - azaleas, wisteria, rosemary, iris, and on and on.  I couldn't help thinking about the magnificent day she and her daughter (the new mother) took us to see the peonies in the park in central Beijing.  Acres and acres of magnificent blooms.  She waited until the ideal day when they were all blooming.  That's the day I started to understand peonies.  Growing up in  Southern California, I just never appreciated peonies.  They're really a more northern flower.

Missing Malaysia Flight 370

I haven't commented on this because everyone else has and because I have nothing to add.  But as I listen to all the speculation, I do have some thoughts on what might have happened.   Some of the key factors would seem to be:

• Intentional or Unintentional?
• Who?
• Why?

The chart starts to outline those choices:

The Why?

If it's intentional the two basic motives (I'm sure there must be more) that I can think of are personal and political/terror.

Personal could be any situation where someone wants revenge or to collect insurance or ??? - possibly in a way that can't be traced.  A business feud, a family feud, or any of the many different reasons people get very angry at each other.

Political/terror would be a situation where some group with relatively little legitimate power is using terror to make their statement.

That brings us back to Who?  There are the usual suspects

• Al Qaeda and various offshoots.  
• But this plane was headed to China and had lots of Chinese passengers.  And just on March 1, there was a terrorist attack in Kunming which the Chinese government tells us was mounted by Uighurs during the China's National People's Congress. So there's a possibility there too.
• Some organization that's either under the radar or not previously connected with terror attacks.

What?

If it was unintentional, something mechanical happened in the plane and it just went down.  But how do you account for the change in flight direction?  Were the pilots trying to go back after there were mechanical problems but the problems were too much?  Why no messages to aviation controllers?  Lots of questions here.

But if it was intentional, there are different options.

Personal

•  I'm not quite sure what would be required to bring down a plane while one passenger attempted to kill another.  I suspect a gun wouldn't be enough. 
• If someone loaded explosives into someone's luggage, this could have done the trick.
• And someone on the ground attacking with missiles seems a stretch, especially since they were flying at such a high altitude.  

And none of these scenarios is consistent with the plane making a radical course change and continuing to ping for so long


Political/Terror

Petronas Towers from What Do I Know?

Kidnapping - Uighurs possibly thought they could kidnap a plane full of Chinese hostages and negotiate with the Chinese government for concessions.  But given the other Uighur attack with knives in a train station, this seems like a pretty sophisticated plot.  And there is little likelihood the Chinese government would honor any promises that were made to save hostages.  More likely there would be harsh reprisals.

Suicide attack - The last major successful airplane suicide attack was 9/11.  Could plotters have tried to duplicate that effort by attacking the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur?  They were, for a while, the tallest buildings in the world.  What if they tried to take over the plane, but somehow the attempt was thwarted like the third plane in the 9/11 attacks and the plane went down? 


Obviously there are many possible scenarios.  I have no crystal ball, but I suspect that the eventual story, if we ever learn it, will fall within these options. 

Whatever the final story, one can't help but feel great sympathy for the passengers and for their families and friends as the agony of waiting drags on. 

The Views Never Get Old - Anchorage To LA

After nearly a foot of fresh snow Friday night, the sun came out Saturday and it was beautiful.   You can feel the warmth of the sun in March which isn't true in January.  I really was wondering why I was leaving.  Oh yes, to visit my mom and son.  We added a quick trip to San Francisco from LA.  It would be a lot easier if we could stop in SF on the way down or up, but it was much cheaper to just fly to LA and then add the SF trip to that.  Ah, the joys of airline ticket pricing.

With the weather pattern we had, we took off to the east right over town so we had a close up look of Anchorage with fresh snow. 

Bigger and sharper if you click on it

To the left of center is the Seward Highway-Dimond intersection.  It's NOT a black and white photo.






And here's a view of more of snowy Anchorage.

According to the passenger next to us who was from Soldotna, the weather pattern caused a United flight to Anchorage to land in Kenai.  Problem was when they were supposed to proceed on their trip to Anchorage, they had a security problem.  Kenai doesn't have big passenger jets landing there and if there are fewer than 50 passengers, they don't have to go through security.  So Kenai doesn't have the necessary security for a big plane.  Not sure what they did.  (I checked to see if the ADN already covered this story.  They did talk about it, but not the security part. So read this as something heard, but not confirmed.)

Our route to Prince William Sound was a little different and I saw some different views, also partly because of all the fresh snow.  I need to find a geologist or glaciologist to find out about the patterns in the snow.

These are all better if you click them

 

And there wasn't much to see until we arrived in LA.  Still trying to learn how all the different options work on my Canon Rebel.  So the color is a little off in this night shot.

We've been arriving early so often on these flights that I'm beginning to think they overestimate the times so that their on time arrival record is better.  And this time I got pre-screened and J had to go through the regular security.  With my back not completely better yet, that was nice.  I had to go through regular twice on the last trip while J got pre-screened. 

[The last post doesn't seem to have been caught by feedburner.  I thought we were over those problems.]

AIFF 2013: Best Animation Winner Mr. Hublot Also Gets Academy Award

The timing of this post shows you how much my life has been interfering with my blogging.  The Oscars were announced two weeks ago, but I'm only getting this up now.


There's no question that visually and technically, this short animation is perfect.  But I was taken by a couple of other short animated films in the Anchorage festival that showed more originality.  Animation Hotline and The Rose of Turaida both had great unusual visuals and interesting content.  I wrote about the whole program - albeit briefly - here.  But there are some visuals from them.

I guess I shouldn't feel too bad about my tardiness.  Mr. Hublot's website lists the AIFF win, but only says Academy Award nominee for Best Animated Short.  

Screen shot taken March 16, 2014

I do understand how keeping up with all your digital media isn't easy, but I think if I'd won the Academy Award, I'd have gotten that up on my main website. 

March Snow and Sun

People have been talking about an early breakup.  That happens every year.  But given that we've had breakup all winter, one starts to think, maybe . . .  Yesterday when I walked to the library, there was lots of exposed bike path, lots of melting ice, mini lakes in the potholes.  You could even see bare earth being exposed.

You can see a little bit around the tree trunk and the edges of the creek.   But later, coming home from dinner, the snow flakes seemed to be racing to the ground.

 

This road had been bare a little earlier.

And then this morning, we had seven or eight new inches.  Again, I'd cleared the deck completely before this latest reminder that it's still winter.   

 

But the sunshine is heating up the house and you can tell the equinox is just days away.  And this afternoon we head south again to look in on my mom, and it's supposed to be 85˚ in LA.  It's better here, really.  

 

Pain

I slipped on the ice last Saturday.  I'd walked a mile to the library and then back, and just before I got to my house I found myself flat on my back on the sheet of ice that's been my street lately.

I wasn't even sure I could get up.  But without too much pain, I managed it, and walked home, put ice on my back, and waited to see how bad it would be.  I could walk and do lots of things, though it hurt, sometimes really bad.  Getting into bed was torture.  I had to bend the wrong angle and my lower left back screamed.  Finding a prone position that didn't hurt took a while.  Did I break a rib, just bruise it, or was it just sore muscle?  Could I make things worse if I did the wrong thing?  Some over-the-counter pain pills, ice, and I finally managed to find a position that wasn't more than a minor irritation and slept the night.

I figured it wasn't too serious because the next day I could walk and bend a little with bearable pain.  But certain moves set of ied's.  I started being very careful about reaching, leaning, bending, all the normal things you do a million times each day without thinking.  Now I had to think about each one.

It was during this time I saw this poster Guadalupe put up on Facebook.

I'd already started noticing other people who walked tenderly and had much more compassion for them than I had before.  I had an invisible pain.  I didn't look any different than before I slipped, but I sure moved more gingerly. 

Good health is so random.  Sure, you can eat well and exercise, but a tree falls, a car veers your way, or, in Vic Fischer's case recently, a camel hears a motorcycle backfire and kicks out just as you're walking by.  (He was in Rajasthan, India at the time.)   Sure, I read and link to Peter's incredible Parkinson's blog, and I see how valiantly he lives his life.  And then I forget again how lucky I am.

It takes a fall like this to remind me to be more aware of others' afflictions.  If they act a little weird, maybe they're in serious pain.  And even those people who match the definition of a 'jerk' probably have a history and/or a condition that would help us understand their behavior.  (Understand isn't the same as approve.)




I did get to the doctor by Wednesday, had an x-ray, and learned I hadn't broken anything. 
Just  some very angry muscle.  I'm clearly moving back to normal.  But I hope I won't forget to stay sensitive to others who might be living their lives with a serious pain or other affliction battling them every step of the way.

The x-ray room had this miniature skeleton and I've added a little graphic to indicate the hot spot.

When people lived in small communities and knew everyone over a lifetime, they tended to know who had what ailments and accommodated (or persecuted) them.  In our more anonymous worlds, we don't know the people we interact with, and don't understand who they are and how they got that way.  And how quickly one's life can change from one condition to another. 

The Condoms - A Short Story With A Long Commentary

[Note:  This post tries to pull together ideas from different places to make sense of things that seem not to make sense.  I've been tinkering with it for several days now, and while I'm still not satisfied, it's time to move on to other things.  Consider this post as working notes.]

"You can go on the internet, you can order these things by mail, . . . make phone calls, and you can get it delivered by mail, you all know that Alaska Airlines will do Goldstreak and you can get things even quickly that way if you need to.  So I don’t think access is a problem, I don’t think that finance, that economics is, and my own view is that by and large sexual activity is recreation. Now if you're doing the activity for procreation, obviously birth control is counter-indicated."

- Eagle River's Sen. Fred Dyson from the Legislative 360 North via the Anchorage Daily News  has already received plenty of attention for this statement (plus the rest of it which you can view at the ADN link above.)

I'd like to play out a little story I imagined when I heard about it and then also talk a little history and use Jonathan Haidt's ideas about moral traits to try to understand the mental gap here.

The Condom - A Short Story

The wind whistled through the poorly insulated wooden home in a rural village off the Alaska road system.  He'd come knocking a couple of hours ago, knowing her mother was away.  She was excited about having a boyfriend, yet a little fearful of what it all meant.  He'd brought some beer and they'd both had too much.  She had refused the beer at first, but she didn't want to appear just a child.  Her body responded to his hands, yet she could hear her mom warning her about getting pregnant.   "We can't do this," she cried out.  "We don't have any condoms." 

He looked down on her and smiled.  He pulled out his cell phone and called Alaska Airlines.  "Goldstream me a dozen condoms," he said into the phone.  Then he looked back at her, "Problem solved."

Fred Dyson can rightfully claim that wasn't what he meant when he said "you can get things even quickly"  but it's what came to mind.

His Alaska Senate page says that Fred Dyson was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, January 16, 1939.  That means he's just had his 75th birthday.   He went to high school in Seattle and has been married since 1966. He would have been 27.  In 1966 the US was just starting to emerge from an era in which pre-marital sex was roundly condemned in mainstream culture. People didn't "live together," they "shacked up" and it was not accepted at all as it is today.  The summer of love in San Francisco was a year away. 

But nature has a way of overcoming social norms and sex was certainly part of many people's high school lives.  But condoms were not sold over the counter.  You had to ask the pharmacist for prophylactics. Birth control pills were approved only six years earlier and were still illegal in some states.  For girls, pregnancy changed everything. (It still does, of course.)  I remember when straight A student XX suddenly vanished from school, no explanations offered.  You were disgraced, and many a young couple were quickly forced to get married.  And as in XX's case, more often than not, these marriages didn't last.   Roe v. Wade was still seven years off, though a couple of states were beginning to legalize abortions. Illegal abortion was a risky endeavor which hundreds of thousands of women a year undertook.

And the happy American family portrayed on shows like Ozzie and Harriet weren't exactly how things were.  From Digital History:

• It was only in the 1920s that, for the first time, a majority of American families consisted of a breadwinner-husband, a home-maker wife, and children attending school.
• The most rapid increase in unwed pregnancies took place between 1940 and 1958, not in the libertine sixties.
• The defining characteristics of the 1950s family--a rising birth rate, a stable divorce rate, and declining age of marriage--were historical aberrations, out of line with long term historical trends.
• Throughout American history, most families have needed more than one breadwinner to support themselves.

[Note:  I haven't independently verified this, but it appears to be a solid source, put up by the College of Education at the University of Houston.  The quote is just a small part of a long piece titled, "Does the American Family Have a History? Family Images and Realities."]

Jonathan Haidt

I've recently become aware of the work of Jonathan Haidt who's written on morality and the human mind.  

Haidt argues, in the Ted Talk video below, that to a certain extent, our minds are pre-programmed.   Our environments will have an impact too, but we aren't blank slates.  He argues humans come pre-programmed with five basic moral traits:

• (Keeping the vulnerable from harm)
• Fairness/reciprocity (Do onto others . . .)
• In-group loyalty 
• Authority/respect (and the need to keep order in groups)
• Purity/sanctity

We all have these values, but, he says, liberals are higher on the first two (Harm/care and Fairness) and conservatives on the last three (Group Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity).  In the Ted Talk he also says there is a constant tension between change and stability.  He looks to Asian religious traditions which look for balance.  The Yin and Yang aren't enemies, he tells us and cites Seng ts'an:

“If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against.  The struggle between ‘for’ and ‘against’ is the mind’s worst disease”

[Looking at the link above the quote, I suspect this is like offering "light is speedy" to represent  Einstein's theories.  Here's a link to the poem that this quote seems to come from.]

Haidt tells us more in an interview on Social Science Space.  He’d been studying morality across countries and was bummed that GWB won in 2000 and 2004.

 “So when I was invited to give a talk to the Charlottesville Democrats in 2004, right after the election, I said ‘Alright, well let me take this cross-cultural theory that I’ve got, and apply it to Left and Right, as though they’re different cultures.’ And boy, it worked well! I expected to get eaten alive: I was basically telling this room full of Democrats that the reason they lost is not because of Karl Rove, and sorcery and trickery, it’s because Democrats, or liberals, have a narrower set of moral foundations: they focus on fairness and care, and they don’t get the more groupish or visceral, patriotic, religious, hierarchical values that most Americans have.

In the split between conservatives and liberals (that the media's reporting of both reinforces and aggravates) both sides move to group loyalty and attack those in their groups who would talk about cooperation with outsiders.  We can see Tea Party candidates doing this with establishment Republicans.  But liberals also play this game.  I'm regularly chastised for not thoroughly condemning 'the enemy' as in this post. 
 
Back to Dyson

I believe that Dyson is wrong in his argument, but I think knowing the world he was raised in and knowing about Haidt's moral traits, we can at least understand how he came to say what he said.  Dyson’s argument has an internal logic if you buy his basic assumptions.  His respect for authority and  for purity and sanctity are reinforced by group loyalty.   The basis of his argument is about personal responsibility and the unfairness of having to pay for other people's birth control.

In the Social Science Space interview, Haidt describes Dyson's comments years before Dyson said them.  Haidt talks about how he watched a lot of Fox news, like an ethnographic study, to understand how conservatives think.  What he found back then, I think helps describe Dyson’s thinking:

"I would watch Fox News shows, and at first it was kind of offensive to me, but once I began to get it, to see ‘Oh I see how this interconnects’ and ‘Oh, you know if you really care about personal responsibility, and if you’re really offended by leeches and mooches and people who do foolish things, then want others to bail them out, yeah, I can see how that’s really offensive, and if you believe that, I can see how the welfare state is one of the most offensive things ever created’. So, I started actually seeing, you know, what both sides are really right about: certain threats and problems. And once you are part of a moral team that binds together, but it blinds you to alternate realities, it blinds you to facts that don’t fit your reality."

So, where Dyson sees people who haven’t taking personal responsibility for their lives and doesn’t see why the tax payer should pay for them to have sex with state funded contraceptives, Senator Berta Gardner (who responded to Dyson in the Senate committee) sees poor women as unfairly treated, in a society that structurally disadvantages them.  It’s not that poor people are lazy and don’t take responsibility, it’s that society’s structure has doomed most of them to low paying jobs where they work long and hard, yet still earn too little to live even the most basic American Dream life. 

My point here is not to debate Dyson. but to point out that he AND his detractors would achieve more success in the legislature for the people of Alaska, if they both acknowledged that they probably don't know everything and probably are not right about everything.  (And if they did, their next election opponents would quote them in attack ads.)  Dyson, I believe, strongly believes what he says and probably is just as perplexed by those attacking him as they are by what he proposed.  Understanding his logic AND the values that underlie it, are the first steps to real communication and potential resolution that doesn't violate anyone's values. (No, I don't think we're as far apart as the extremists say and the media echo. Yes, I know that there will always be some people who won't be satisfied.)   

Without recognizing and acknowledging that the other side probably has valid points, we deny their humanity and they ours.  They aren't the enemy, and certainly not agents of Satan. Rather, each side places greater weight on different values and thus each side sees different ‘facts’ and interprets what they see differently.

Dyson sees lazy people doing frivolous things and thinks they should pay for it themselves, not using taxpayer money.  Gardner sees state funded birth control as an act of compassion to poor people struggling to get by in a society tilted against them.  Furthermore she believes that easy access to, and use of, birth control would lead to fewer unwanted babies and more ability for women to get an education and keep a job.  She sees the immediate costs to taxpayers of supplying the birth control as cheap compared to the long term costs of dealing with kids whose parents didn’t want them and aren’t capable of responsibly raising them.



I should probably mention that my personal interactions with Sen. Dyson occurred at Alaska's political corruption trials.  It turned out he was attending the trials and also reading my blog posts which he said he liked.   He was polite and respectful.  Another time I had to call him to ask him about a mistake he'd made when introducing Joe Miller at a political rally.  He again was cordial and acknowledged he'd made an error and had confused Miller with (current Senate candidate) Dan Sullivan.  These were intersections of our lives where we had some common ground.   Situations where what we saw in each other was positive, despite our strong differences in other areas.  And I think these intersections would allow us to converse civilly on issues where our personal values would lead us to conflicting conclusions.


I'd strongly recommend Jonathan Haidt's Ted Talk on the moral mind.  It supports my approach here which some of my readers find too sympathetic to the 'bad guys.' It does what is essential to break an impasse - it changes the discussion by focusing on the process rather than the content of the impasse.  It asks people to look at their underlying values and to become conscious of their behavior.  [I don't see this video in my preview, so if it doesn't work, you can find it (The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives) here.]


Responsibility of Politicians

I would add another aspect to this.  I believe that Fred Dyson is certain that he's right. And in the United States, everyone is entitled to his opinion.  But once you take the responsibility of political office, you have an obligation to represent fairly the views of as many as possible.  (I know that not everyone can be satisfied.)  You have a responsibility to listen to others and to seek 'the truth' rather than to simply seek a victory over those who disagree with you.

I believe that Dyson's missing a lot of the picture. Our understanding and practice of sex is very different from what it was when he was young. (And our belief of what it was when he was young is also probably flawed as the citations from digital history above suggest.)
Our differences have, perhaps, more to do with the moral standards Jonathan Haidt says we came pre-programmed with.    The challenge is to test our truths, to find common ground with those who give more weight to other moral traits.   Rigid, moralistic stances on either side won't lead to good legislation.

Of course, cooperating with 'the other' requires that the other is willing to also cooperate.  My take on the Tea Party is that they are certain they are right as reflected in their refusal to compromise.    Human history is littered with tragic stories of the suffering caused by those who believed they owned the truth and  who had the political or physical power to enforce their truth.

Why Many Of My Videos Won't Work For A While

Viddler, a site similar to Youtube in that you can put videos there and then embed them into your blog post, recently notified me they were shutting down the free accounts.   I posted about this once March 2, 2013.

I used YouTube in the beginning, but uploading was very slow and videos had to be very short.  So one day I discovered Viddler and found they uploaded faster, they had sharper images, and you could upload longer videos.  So I switched over.  That was back in August 2007. 

In 2010 Viddler sent out emails to members saying they were going to convert to paid accounts only.  I told them about my blog, that I was an early adopter, and all the trouble it would cause me to replace all the video on my blog. I suggested they let me continue free as an early adopter.  I'd even put up my only ad for them as a sponsor of my blog.  They agreed in concept, but it turned out they just backed down on closing down the free accounts.  But I got the message.  Meanwhile, Google had bought YouTube, and the quality there was much improved.  So I started using YouTube as my main server for video on the blog.  Once the video is on the server, you can get the embed code and put that in your blog (or on your website) and the video appears.

So about a month ago, I got the new email that they were now closing down the free part of their website.  I had 478 videos on Viddler.    So I've been busily downloading.  I had some problems and the staff were very prompt and helpful.  They even offered me a way to batch download the videos, but I couldn't make it work.

In any case, with the exception of about a dozen videos in December 2008 which had some sort of problem they've said they'd try to fix, I think I have everything downloaded.  Today was the deadline, but they assured me that they wouldn't shut down my page until I had it all done.

So now I'm uploading videos to YouTube so I can swap out the Viddler hosted videos for Youtube hosted videos.  In the near future, the ones that were Viddler will probably stop working.  I'm starting to replace the most recent ones - and I really haven't used Viddler that much recently.  So I think I might get 2014 and 2013 taken care of before the account closes.  Most of those I saved originally to YouTube.  It's the older ones that will take a while and may be unviewable until I get them swapped out.  If I can do ten a day, I could get them done in a couple of months.  

MENO, ewok, Bisco, and Will - Graffiti Artists At Innovation Lab

I've been posting now and then about graffiti and graffiti artists.  The film Exit Through The Gift Shop gave me some sense of graffiti artists and I've paid more attention to what I see on the streets.  I get curious about who the people are, why they are using public

spaces to put up their messages. 

When I went to the Innovation Lab to meet its director Darla Hane, she told me that graffiti artists were coming.  While I was there they began showing up carrying work.


Arielo Taylor (Bisco)  and ewok were the first two to bring stuff in - their own and others.

Arielo (Bisco) Taylor's spider and wolf

ewok's work

There was some talk about what graffiti actually is.  Is it still graffiti if it's done on wood or canvas and hung on a wall  instead of spray painted on?  What about stencils?  Stickers?  Tags? 


This isn't the first time these artists have had their work displayed indoors like this, but they thought this was probably the biggest collection of graffiti art in Anchorage.

MENO's work

I recognized the name MENO immediately.  I'd seen it around town.  And there was a MENO piece at an Out North event, and I asked if he were around.  But he wasn't.

MENO showed up later at the Innovation Lab. 

And he was ok with me taking a picture.  He doesn't work on public walls since he was arrested and paid a fine of over five thousand dollars.  His signature is very distinct and easy to read.












One of the other artists there was Will.  The eye was inked on paper and then Will cut out all the white areas.  I've seen very good Chinese paper cut art, but this was something else altogether. [Note, font for "Will's Eyes" from fontmeme.]

Here are some of his works there (in addition to the eye).  I immediately assumed the picture in the lower left was a self-portrait and Will confirmed that.


It's clear to me that these guys aren't just guys with spray cans.  They have a real sense of art.  I'd encourage Anchorage folks to drop by the innovation lab at Loussac - 4th floor where audio/visual used to be - while this stuff is up.  And it's for sale.

And try to find Darla and see how you can use or be of use to the lab.