AIFF 2014: Tony Sheppard Heading To Anchorage - Things Start Tomorrow With Free AM Discussion of Alaska Film Industry

I just ran into Anchorage International Film Festival Founder Tony Sheppard at SEATAC - headed to the festival to staff the hospitality suite.  He's moved to Bellingham, in part to be near is dad.


I've scheduled my return so I'll be back for the festival too.

Tomorrow (Friday) morning at the Bear Tooth  at 11:30am there is  free discussion  of the state of the Alaska Film Industry.  Here's the list of panelists:

Frank Hall Green, Director of WildLikeD.K. Johnston, Executive Producer/Director of Alaska FilmmakersDeborah Schildt, President of the Alaska Film Group & Production Manager at PiksikDave Worrell, Development Specialist at the Alaska Film Production Promotion ProgramKelly Mazzei, Executive Director of the Alaska Film Office
* Free Event *

 WildLike is the opening film Friday evening.

Like last year there will be some interesting off-the-radar events people should consider.  It's really hard with so many things happening at the same time.

Saturday at Loussac at 3:00 there will be a (FREE)  film called The Homestretch followed by a discussion with local folks who work with the homeless.

The Homestretch follows three homeless teens as they fight to stay in school, graduate, and build a future. Each of these smart, ambitious teenagers - Roque, Kasey and Anthony - will surprise, inspire, and challenge audiences to rethink stereotypes of homelessness as they work to complete their education while facing the trauma of being alone and abandoned at an early age. 

Stay after the free screening at the Loussac Library of "The Homestretch" for a panel discussion of the problem of Youth Homelessness in Anchorage . The panel will consist of Josh Louwerse, Outreach Case Manager at Covenant House Alaska; Benita Stepp, Charlie Elder House Program Director; Amanda Metivier, Facing Foster Care In Alaska

This may sound depressing (go see Rocks In My Pocket if you want to learn about depression) but I have to say the most exciting event I went to last year was an interactive film and discussion on the death penalty.


My advice now is to check the schedule at Festival Genius - click on the grid for each day.  There are some problems on my computer - some of the names of the films are obscured - but it gives you a good overview of what's playing and there are useful popups to see about each film/event.

Go to schedule, then click on grid.  Click here for Saturday's grid.

Climbing Prohibited or Aqua Pura MCMVI or Playing With Photoshop

How many buildings have climbing prohibited signs?


Here's the water tower in Seattle's Volunteer Park where climbing is verboten.

Actually, this appears to have been a favorite rock climbing site.    Mountain Project, a rock climbers website, has a "Rock Climbing Guide to 122,093 Routes", including a post dated in 2009 for the water tower.  They have pictures too.

"Description 
Three fun expanses of brick wall, separated by cement ledges. Brick is uneven with lots of little holds and pockets. Route will depend on which side of the tower you choose to climb. Watch out for the cement ledges, from underneath they look positive, but they are slopers!
You can also spend an enjoyable afternoon traversing around the base of the tower. 

Location 
The tower was built as a water reservoir in 1906, but is now empty. It is located in the middle of Volunteer Park in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. Address: 1247 15th Ave. E
From the inside of the tower, choose your window & anchor spot & that will decide which side of the tower you'll climb.
We climbed the east facing side, just to the right of a tall, very leafy tree. 

Protection 
Climb the inside of the tower and rig an anchor to one of the fixed metal banisters. Feed the rope through the window grating onto the ledge & then use a stick to drop the rope over the edge. Belay from the top, inside the tower. Once the climber reaches the top they will need to be lowered down, as all the windows have grating."

Here's a post card of the water tower from 1909 that was part of the displays once you 'climb' the stairs to the top inside.   

And here's a June 4, 2010 report of an encounter with the police from a Cascade Climber forum:

"Ah, so the sun came out finally in Seattle. No time to make it to the mountains to climb, so thought I would go for a quick session on the water tower at Volunteer park. The tried and true training ground for the broke Seattle climber.  
I get a few laps in, when I hear "Sir! sir! Get down off of there!". I hop down (from a whopping 2ft) and am approached by a Seattle police officer (along with a parks employee hiding in his truck). The cop tells me that the tower is "private" (!!) property and that it is only to be used for its intended purpose. I tell him that I'm pretty sure its public property and that people have been traversing it for DECADES without incident. At which point he says, "Are you arguing with me? I am a POLICE officer, do you want to go to jail?". I say, "No.. I'm just trying to understand this. Why not put a sign up then? To notify people of the rules, because this is the first I've heard of this" To which he replies, "it wouldn't do any good, people will climb on it anyways" (um, OK!?). I head back to my car, while he sticks around waiting for me to leave.
I considered being arrested, just to see if any of this would hold up. Anyone have insight in to this? Are they justified at all? At any given day there is someone traversing the tower, are they for real?!
Anyone want to plan a water tower climb-off-protest in the near future...?"

Well, now they have a sign.  (Was the cop celebrating the anniversary of Tiananmen Square by harassing the climber?)

Now, More Pictures Of The Tower With Some Photoshop Help

Of all the updated programs I'm dealing with now that I have a new computer, Photoshop (CS6) is the one that's giving me the fewest challenges.  I'm not sure what exciting new things I can do with it, but what I do like is that all the basic functions I use all the time, work they way they did in the CS3 version I was using before.  In all the others - from Safari, to iMovie, to, well everything - the basic moves are all frustratingly different.  Photoshop is, so to speak, still in English.  

So here are some experiments I did with my water tower photo.  First the original.  

This is the original.   It's pretty boring, especially since the sunny parts are overexposed and the parts in the shade are underexposed.


In the picture of the tower way up above, I just did simple adjustments so the parts in the sun got a lower exposure and the parts in the shade got a higher exposure.  Oh, yeah, I added the spider.  I took a photo of a  spider I had, but because it was so small a photo, I touched it up to make it bigger.


But then I started to have some fun.







I did this one using curves under image adjustments.

This one used the 'glowing edges' filter.

I got this one with the gradient map  (in Image Adjustment) - using Yellow, Violet, Orange, Blue.


















My favorite is this one using the water color filter

Click here for help with Roman Numerals.

Towels, Grate Art, Janet K. West, And Why I Haven't Posted About Ferguson - Choosing The Worlds We See

The Ferguson Grand Jury decision begs to be written about - and many, many people have given that beggar alms.  There's lots to write about Alaska's new governor and lieutenant governor.  The stock market is at record highs while so many people are barely scraping by.  What about the metamorphosis of our 'knowing' of Bill Cosby?

But my attention lately hasn't been controlled by cable news, newspapers, or even internet news.  No, it's been strongly influenced by two youngsters both under two years old.  That world looks very different.  I have posts bubbling up on "Why Do Toddlers Hate Naps?";  "Gaining Power By Learning To Put Words Together"; and  "How Babies Know Babies From Adults".

This post is going to focus on things we examined on a walk the other day.

Grate Art

This collage gets a little busy, but the busyness does suggest how much there is to observe in these generally unseen parts of our daily lives.  And it shows that even engineers consider aesthetics for their most mundane products.  And I couldn't help comparing the pattern on my little shark's hat, that her uncle knitted for her, to the grate art.

This puffball we encountered seemed to fit into this set of pictures well.  

But back to grates.  Here's a grate around a tree.  And in the next picture you can see what the arrow is pointing to, as people have taken this practical way to protect and water these trees stranded on sidewalk, to also honor someone they held in high esteem.

The grating does look a bit like an old zoo cage.  Does this tree feel imprisoned here?  Isolated from its tree friends?  The word we use for people, probably doesn't match what plants 'feel', but if you think this thought is totally ridiculous, read this at Scientific American.  There's so much we don't know.

I had a good feeling about Janet K. West after seeing this plaque.  However, the cynic in me also knows that anyone can buy an indulgence and replace one's past with a  rosier image.  The Catholics may have officially banned this practice, but Americans have embraced it.  Just look up the real stories of the many people whose money has put their names on public buildings and spaces.

So I did some searching about Janet K. West, and the little I found seemed to confirm that she deserved a plaque.

The first hit wasn't solid evidence, but a piece of data to be weighed along with whatever else I could find.  From the Housing Resources Board

Janet West 

This development was named after Janet West, a past mayor of Bainbridge Island and long time advocate of affordable housing. It is a nine-unit bungalow style complex consisting of one two-bedroom and eight one-bedroom apartments.

This sounds good.  There are lots of reasons they could have given, and being an long time advocate of affordable housing is a good one.  But alone, it's not convincing.  We can write anything about anyone.  But then I found a book chapter that Janet K. West wrote.  Here are just a couple of excerpts, but anyone who voluntarily gives up their power so that others can achieve more fully, especially teachers, is ok in my book.

"The biggest discovery I made when I started to have students evaluate their own work was that often they were the only ones who could do it. To put it another way, I realized I couldn't always teach them because only they could discover what they needed to learn. This revelation came when a writing class of college-bound students was working a painful route through Loren Eisley's Immense Journey. I wanted to see how much of the man and his attitudes they'd begun to discover. We had struggled with vocabulary, style, and ideas. I say "we," for I too was struggling to find means to help them cope. They took dialectic notes. We had had almost page-by-page oral analysis. They had written precis. Nothing broke through the wall of frustration, confusion, misconception, even hostility that grew higher daily. So along about Chapter Five, I turned to an exercise I'd learned to use in literature classes to help students understand the characters- the bio- poem. This time, though, they were to write one about the author."

A biopoem?  I didn't know what that was.  But  Read Write Think quickly remedied that.  Here are  the first of the 12 lines of a biopoem:

"How to Write a Biopoem 

(Line 1) First name 

(Line 2) Three or four adjectives that describe the person 

(Line 3) Important relationship (daughter of . . . , mother of . . . , etc)"

And the end of the Chapter:

"With so much going for it, I'm embarrassed to think how long it took me to discover peer evaluation. I knew, with a kind of desperation, that my students would be weaned (if only by graduation) and only by happy circumstance would have a college roommate, a secretary, or a spouse to do for them what I'd been doing-showing them the weak- nesses and errors in their writing. I also knew I hadn't provided them with enough tools or practice to do the job for themselves, to be their own evaluators. Now I feel more confident that these vital dimensions are being added to their education, largely through use of writing-to- learn exercises, which frequently require sharing and peer response. It has benefits for me, too. I can and do assign more work in smaller chunks, while actually decreasing my paper-grading load, because most of the small assignments lead to formative evaluation. Both my students and I know more clearly what I'm looking for when I grade the final product. I have a much clearer idea of the quality to expect when I read that product. Best of all, they've learned more: about the subject, about themselves, and about learning."

I can relate to this.  I used to harangue my grad students that they had to learn to think for themselves.  What were they going to do when they graduated and no longer had teachers to tell them what to read and then helped them figure out what it meant?  They were going to have to do it on their own.  So, yes, I think I'd like Janet K. West and I'm glad I got to meet her with my little shark as we walked down the street and paid attention to the little things around us, without any thought of Ferguson or Cosby.

Oh yes, the towel up on top.  It was hanging on the bench at the playground.  When we went back the next day, it was still there and I thought we could use it to dry the slide, which had some ice and snow on it.  But when I picked it up, it was frozen solid.

The shark decided to skip the slide, but had a great time on the swing after I used some leaves to dry the seat.  And she learned a little bit about the effects of cold.









I'm not saying we shouldn't pay attention to the Fergusons, Cosbys, and other national and international events.  But let's put them in perspective.  If we all could enjoy the little wonders around us, perhaps we'd have more joy and less hate altogether.

And as I write about Janet K. West, I realize I know nothing about her but these tidbits.  And possibly the people who admired her didn't know about or ignored some hidden trait she had that cast her in a less positive light.  We all have done or said things we wish we could take back.  We have to learn to understand the complexity of human beings who so often combine both great, admirable qualities  with darker ones.  And we have to figure out ways to minimize the darkness and find just ways to deal with the darkness when it casts shadows on the greatness.

Being with young, young children helps one concentrate on the possibility inherent in each person and reflect on what mysterious (and not so mysterious) forces stain, or even derail those possibilities in so many.  Reading great literature from many cultures, reminds us that the complexity of humans has been around since the beginning in every culture.  

AIFF 2014: Short Narratives In Competition: A Box of Chocolates

This category is like a box of chocolates - lots of little delicious bites of films.  So many choices, which should you pick?  Which will be best?  I haven't seen any of these films, but I've gathered crumbs from each, but not enough to spoil the surprise.

The Short Narratives in competition are spread over three different short narrative programs.  Plus there are several other Short Narrative programs.  I've color coded the programs - the reds are in Global Village, the greens are in Love and Pain, and the purple is in Mixed Bag.

OVERVIEW

1. THE LIST OF SHORT NARRATIVES IN COMPETITION
2. DESCRIPTIONS OF EACH GROUPED BY THE PROGRAMS THEY'RE IN
3. LISTS OF THE OTHER SHORT NARRATIVE PROGRAMS

1.  THE LIST OF SHORT NARRATIVES IN COMPETITION

Narrative Shorts In Competition √
Film	Director	Country	Length	Program
Arena	Martin Rath	Poland	23m	Global Village
Given Your History	Molly McGlynn	Canada	15m	Global Village
How Hipólito Vázquez Found Magic Where He Never Expected To Find It  [De cómo Hipólito Vázquez encontró magia donde no buscaba]	Matias Rubio	Argentina	15m	Global Village
Till Then [Bis Gleich]	BenjaminWolff	Germany	20m	Global Village
Tom in America	Flavio Alves	Brazil	17m	Mixed Bag
Universal Language	Kirsten Russell	USA	35m	Love & Pain
What Cheer?	Michael Slavens	USA	17m	Love & Pain

[UPDATE, Dec. 6, 2014:  It turns out I left out Full Windsor - a super short narrative in competition.  It plays in the Love and Pain program.]

2.  DESCRIPTIONS OF THEM GROUPED BY THE PROGRAMS THEY'RE IN

There are four films in competition in the Global Village program.

Global Village - Shorts Program

Sun, Dec 07 3:00 PM  AK Experience Large   Thu, Dec 11      7:30 PM  AK Experience Small

Into The Silent Sea | Andrej Landin 2013  **How Hipolito Vazquez Found Magic Where He Never Expected | Matias Rubio 2013    Intermission | Marielle Gautier 2014  **Arena | Martin Rath 2013   **Given Your History | Molly McGlynn 2014    **Till Then | Benjamin Wolff 2014    **= films in competition

Screenshot from trailer - "shot in a perpetual twilight"

Arena
Martin Rath   
Poland
23m √

Culture.Pl lists this Polish film, with a German director,  among The Most Interesting Debut Films of 2013

It won what appears to be the main international prize at the Cork Film Festival where they posted this brief assessment:

"Grand Prix International (€1,000)
Martin Rath, Poland
Jury Statement: From the first to the final frame, Arena maintains a threatening ambiguity. Shot in a perpetual twilight, things are always about to get dark, and Rath’s immense skill is to hold the tension as the film oscillates between machismo and sensitivity.
Cork Short Film Nominee for the European Film Awards 2014

ARENA"

From the Krakow Film Festival:

"A hitchhiker is taken in by an remote Polish mountain community. Absorbed by the charismatic locals and unforgiving harshness of his new environment he constitutes his presence in the mountains. But to whom do we have to prove of what we're made?"

Part of Global Village Program that plays:

Sun, Dec 07 3:00 PM  AK Experience Large  

Thu, Dec 11      7:30 PM  AK Experience Small

***********************************************************


Given Your History

Image from  National Screen Institute Canada:

Canada
15m √

This is the US premiere of this film.  It's only been publicly shown once so far - in Hamilton, Canada

From the National Screen Institute Canada:

NSI Drama Prize short Given Your History, from writer/director Molly McGlynn and producer Laura Perlmutter, is getting even more festival exposure.
Next month it screens at the Hamilton Film Festival on Saturday, November 8 at 9 p.m. as part of the drama shorts 2 programme at the Staircase Theatre.
The short also screens in Alaska in December at the Anchorage International Film Festival as part of their short film selections.
Given Your History is an honest look at two sisters trying to move on after their mother’s death from breast cancer.

This means, Anchorage audiences will be among the first to see this film, and it's possibly an US premiere.  There apparently has been a shorter (4 minutes) version that's played in fesitivals Seattle and elsewhere.

Part of Global Village Program that plays:

Sun, Dec 07 3:00 PM  AK Experience Large  

Thu, Dec 11      7:30 PM  AK Experience Small

***********************************************************

How Hipólito Vázquez Found Magic Where He Never Expected To Find It  [De cómo Hipólito Vázquez encontró magia donde no buscaba]
Matias Rubio
Argentina
15m √

From Two Short Nights Film Festival website:

"Hipólito Vázquez is a talent scout. With his loyal partner Cholo, he is looking for a little child whose supposed to “do magic with the football”. Therefore they go on a long journey to the distant Club “La Camelia” following the advices of a mystery man. But as the trip goes along, not everything goes as planned and maybe what he ends up discovering was not exactly what he expected to find."

Based on a map on the films Facebook page, this appears to be only the third US showing.  It got the Grand Jury Prize at the Indiana Short Film Festival in October this year.

Part of Global Village Program that plays:

Sun, Dec 07 3:00 PM  AK Experience Large  

Thu, Dec 11      7:30 PM  AK Experience Small

***********************************************************

Image from Spiffest

Till Then [Bis Gleich]
Benjamin Wolff
Germany
20m √

From a review by Beth Groundwater at the Breckenridge Film Festival:

"A man and a woman sit at their respective windows across from each other on a busy street in Berlin, Germany, and observe the interesting minor dramas unfolding on the street below them. They never speak, but they acknowledge each others presence. But then one day the man does not appear. What should the woman do?
Instead of relying on on a preponderance of dialogue to express emotion and move the story forward, the scriptwriter, Tara Lynn Orr, and director, Benjamin Wolff, expertly use the characters' actions to tenderly reveal the story to the viewer, the courage it takes for the woman to act, and the bittersweet result. This nineteen minute smile awaits you!"

Part of Global Village Program that plays:

Sun, Dec 07 3:00 PM  AK Experience Large  

Thu, Dec 11      7:30 PM  AK Experience Small

***********************************************************

***********************************************************

Two films in competition in the Love & Pain program.

Love & Pain - Shorts Program

Sat, Dec 06  12:00 PM    Alaska Experience Large Thu, Dec 11  6:00 PM     Alaska Experience Large

Four Brothers. Or Three. Wait ... Three. | Philip Buiser 2013 The Mourning Hour | Susan Cohen 2013 **Universal Language | Kirsten Russell 2014 Beneath the Trees | Kitty Mahoney 2014 Reaching Home | Kenneth Murphy 2013 Full-Windsor | Faraday Okoro 2014 **What Cheer? | Michael Slavens 2014 **= films in competition

[UPDATED 12/6:}  Full Windsor

Image from Ari Fulton Design for Stage and Film

Faraday Okoror
USA
6m

A 10 year old boy battles his mother in order to wear his father's tie to school.

Part of Love & Pain Program that plays:
Sat, Dec 06  12:00 PM    Alaska Experience Large

Thu, Dec 11  6:00 PM     Alaska Experience Large

***********************************************************

Universal Language
Kirsten Russell
USA
35m √

Excerpt from Universal Language's Kickstarter page:  (It got more than its $3500 goal)

"In the spring of 2013 I had plans to be in Austria for two weeks.  I got a call from a long-time friend (and gifted actress), Frederique Nahmani who had moved back to France.  And she threw and idea at me.
"If you're going to be in the neighborhood, why not swing over to Paris...and shoot a little film."Now what normal person, let alone filmmaker, is gonna turn that down?
the scriptI just had to write a script. So I started with the most obvious thing…the language. Or for me the language barrier since I'd be shooting a film as a stranger in a strange land.  I knew who my lead actress would be (clearly Frederique) and since I like to write for specific actors, like dysfunctional muses, I approached Marcel Simoneau, another long-time friend and filmmaking buddy.  And with these two, I made up Dan and Sophie... "

The film she did for Kickstarter probably gives us a good introduction to the film:

There's a long interview at FilmCourage if you want to know more.

Part of Love & Pain Program that plays:
Sat, Dec 06  12:00 PM    Alaska Experience Large

Thu, Dec 11  6:00 PM     Alaska Experience Large

***********************************************************

What Cheer?

Michael Slavens

USA

17m √

It's hard to find something about a lot of these movies that isn't just a copy of the official description of the movie.  I want you to get a sense of the movie without giving anything away that might spoil it.  So, here's what a film maker Patrick Longstreth wrote on his blog 

"One of my favorites was “What Cheer?” starring Richard Kind. We shared a Q&A with director Michael Slavens, who is a thoughtful filmmaker and really nice guy. I was very happy to see his film win the “Filmmaker’s Favorite” award."

What Cheer?  won the The Black Bear Award for Best Use of Sound at the Athens (Ohio) International Film Festival.

Part of Love & Pain Program that plays:

Sat, Dec 06  12:00 PM    Alaska Experience Large

Thu, Dec 11  6:00 PM     Alaska Experience Large

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***********************************************************


And one film in competition in the Mixed Bag Shorts Program:

Mixed Bag  - Shorts Program

Thu, Dec 11 8:00 PM    Alaska Experience Large

One Armed Man | Tim Guinee 2014 Samantha '66 | Dan Wainio 2014 **Tom in America | Flavio Alves 2014 The Ladder | Pete Fitz 2013 Zugwang | Yolanda Centeno 2014 **in competition

Tom in America

Flavio Alves

Brazil

17m √

This one only plays once as far as I can tell.  And although its director is a Brazilian and this is categorized as a Brazilian film, it takes place in New York, with a couple who celebrate their 50th anniversary, and then . . .  It stars two academy award nominees - Sally Kirkland who was nominated according to Wikipedia

"1987 for Anna, for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Drama"

and Burt Young, who, again according to Wikipedia, was also nominated for his role

"as Sylvester Stallone's brother-in-law Paulie in Rocky (1976), for which he received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor."

He's also been in a lot of other well-known movies television shows from Chinatown to M*A*S*H and the Sopranos.

The clip below is NOT the official trailer, but the opening theme scored by Walter Schick.

Part of Mixed Bag that plays:

Thu, Dec 11 8:00 PM    Alaska Experience Large Unfortunately at the same time as Global Village Program with four other Short Narrative films in competition.   So see Global Village on Sunday Dec. 7 at 3pm

***********************************************************

***********************************************************

3.  LISTS OF THE OTHER SHORT NARRATIVE PROGRAMS


Three More Narrative Shorts Programs:

• Alaska Grown (Thursday 8pm), 
• Mexican (Friday Dec 12)  and 
• Chinese Short Film Programs (Sun Dec. 14)

Plus fifteen, mostly 2 minute, shorts from kids in the Iditarod School District.

Alaska Grown

Sat, Dec 13  5:00 PM   Alaska Experience Large

Russian Jack | Jonathan Lang 2014 Speak No Evil | James Elden 2014 Wrong Side Up | Henry McComas 2014 STORYTELLING | the movie | Stefanie Black 2013 Six Dead Bodies Duct-Taped to a Merry-Go-Round | Kevin T. Bennett 2014 Look What You Did | Eirin Strickland 2014 Beneath the Trees | Kitty Mahoney 2014

Short Films From the Guanajuato International Film Festival

7:00 PM     Fri, Dec 12  Alaska Experience Theater - Large

Under The Sun [Bajo el sol] | Arcadi Palerm 2012  Fifteen Years [Quince Años] | Liliana Torres 2012  An Eye [Un ojo] | Lorenza Manrique 2012  No Brakes [Sin Frenos] | Pancho Ortega  Eskimo [Eskimal] | Homero Ramírez 2011

UAA Confucius Institute  Short Films from China

Sun, Dec 14  2:30 PM  Alaska Experience Large

Return to Prairie | Liqi Yi Can’t Piss | Xinqi Song Summer Secret | Zeng Zeng Grandfather’s Wishes | Yu We

There are also feature films as part of the Mexican films and the Chinese Films.

Yarn Or Tea Emergency?

So, it did snow overnight.  More of a dusting really (see picture below).  But then sometime between 9 and 10 am or so, the power went off.  It's only just gone back on.  About four hours.  It stayed reasonably comfortable inside, but outside, near 30˚F, with a gusty wind, it was downright chilly.  And most places downtown were closed.  The bakery had baked goods for sale, but just water to drink.  The knit shop had the sign above.   A nearby eating place had a sign saying they'd be open again "at the convenience of Puget Sound Power."

Rainy Seattle Day

We have had a couple of almost warm sunny days.  (Warm?  In the 50's and comfy sitting in the sun.) And grey days, but the day we decided to go into Seattle to go to the bookstore, today, it was raining. Waiting for the ferry, the windows got so fogged up that we could barely see the cars around us.

Once the engine was back on the windshield cleared, but with a sleeping baby in back, we mostly stayed in the car.

There wasn't too much traffic, and we even found a parking space near the bookstore, with big leafy puddles all around.

The noodle shop we hit up for take out was closed, so we headed down Madison, passed the Seattle public library, and down the hill to catch the 3pm ferry back.

More on the bookstore later.







Meanwhile there's talk of snow.  We'll see:

Updated Friday 5:35 p.m.

"A very busy night around here -- let's start with the snow. We're still rain at times this evening with some mixed snow in Snohomish County, but temperatures will cool later tonight and snow levels will drop. A Snow Advisory is in effect from 9 p.m. Friday through 11 a.m. Saturday for as much as 1-3 inches of snow for King, Snohomish, Island and Skagit Counties plus eastern Clallam County and eastern Kitsap County, with particular emphasis on Snohomish County. Temperatures in the 50s in the morning have plummeted to the 40s and 30s with parts of Snohomish County already had some rain/snow or wet snow Friday afternoon with temperatures in the mid-upper 30s."

It's after 9pm here, but no snow yet.  But it's still raining and colder.  

Tofurkey: When Vegetarian Food Is Based On Trying To Copy Meat

Tofurkey, vegeburgers, vegan bacon,  meatless meatballs, and other non-meat versions of meat dishes can all taste ok, even good.  But the eater, especially someone who isn't a vegetarian, will be inevitably be comparing the meatless version with the real version.  And most of the time, the fake meat won't live up to the real thing.  Disappointment, and at least an unconscious conclusion that vegetarian food is second class.

In India, things are turned around.  Meat restaurants are labeled non-veg.  Veg is first.  When you start with vegetables, you create recipes that take advantage of the flavors, textures, and colors of the various fruits and grains and leafy bounty of the earth.  Indian cuisine marvelously combines  all these gifts of nature in such delicious variety that one would never need to eat flesh.

Of course, when one is raised on meaty meals, habit and emotional attachments give meat an allure that is hard to give up.  The connection, for example, between Thanksgiving and turkey is hard to overcome.  My casual vegetarianism allows me to eat a little turkey.

Evolutionarily, humans are omnivores.  We have canines in our tooth collection.  Eating meat is natural for humans.  But so is eating vegetarian.   A turkey-free Thanksgiving, in my view, is better than a fake turkey substitute.  The key ingredients in a Thanksgiving dinner are family, friends, and appreciation of all we have to be thankful for, not the turkey.

[This was originally posted Nov. 27, 2014 at 8:27am, but Feedburner didn't pick it up and update blogrolls, so I'm reposting in hopes it might get onto blogrolls.]

Gramping, Learning My New Computer And Software - Testing iMovie - The Wind

There are two grandkids here now.  That's a big distraction.  The older one and I mixed bread dough today.  She paid very close attention and we didn't make too much of a mess.  This is a very simple recipe from a Josey Baker bread book I got at the library - just flour, salt, yeast, and water.  But it does call for it to rise at least three hours and then spend the night in the refrigerator.  So maybe all the fermenting will give it interesting tastes.

I'm also getting used to how to do things on Yosemite (the new Mac operating system) and figuring out how to find things in the various other updated software. iMovie is proving a longer haul - partly because I have about 30 minutes of interview with Attila Szász, the director of The Ambassador to Bern which will show in the Anchorage International Film Festival in December.  So I'm transcribing it and figuring out how I want to edit it.  Part of it is a discussion of taking a real historical event and then fictionalizing it.

It was taking so long that I decided to just make a short video from start to finish - it saves video in different ways that I'm trying to get my head around - just to do one.  It was windy this morning when I woke up, so I took a picture of the evergreen out the window blowing in the wind.

The windows here muffled the sound pretty well, so I looked for some wind sound effects - found 'cave and wind' - and I also tried out the video effects.  The video is short, but look at the difference between the raw footage (what I normally would have used with the old iMovie I was using) and the enhanced video with the added sound.





This is a little related to the discussion of taking a real event and fictionalizing it.  For creative film makers, this offers lots of possibilities: the enhanced mood of the video effects and the sound of wind from the sound effects tools.  But when you compare the beginning few seconds to the second part, you can see the dangers of this sort of editing for people putting up the news.  It's easy to make the video far more exciting than what it really was.  Of course, everyone knows this, but I haven't had such easy access to such smooth and easy enhancements.

So, as you watch video on tv or online, look for whether you're seeing what the camera caught or what the editing room wrought.

Digital Cameras As Mirrors

My little angel, not even two yet, is fully aware of what a camera is.  She even poses and wants to see the picture right away.  She knows it's her.  But she was also eager to see the crow pictures.  And she likes how you can zoom in and see details.

I'm a little creeped out about this.  She also thinks nothing of Skype.  It's natural to her.  Totally normal.  But then so were phones for me.  Though my mother took a long time to get over her childhood lessons that long distance calls were expensive, even when they became  inexpensive.

It got me to wondering how people reacted when mirrors first started being available.  Did they worry about how kids used them?  How adults used them?  Was there concern about vanity?  I suspect it's like digital cameras today.  Some people love them and don't think about the kinds of questions I'm raising.  Others wonder how much time kids should be playing with these things.  Others use them as babysitters - just handing the devices to tiny kids so kid won't fuss while they do other things.  I understand the temptation as I spend long time periods with my angel.  I'm 'the device' my daughter is using to distract her child with.

I'm not terribly worried about moderate use.  My parents didn't think mirrors were any big deal and I'm sure they delighted in my first encounters with them and recognizing myself.  In some way the popularity of selfies suggests that many people aren't self conscious of how they look.  But I suspect that there is a sizable part of the teenage population that dreads friends with cameras on their phones.

I was going to leave it like this - just some notes in reaction to what I'm seeing.  But I did take a quick look at what the internet has to offer on this topic.  It's depressing how many websites there are now that hire people to write short facile answers to every conceivable question, like "What is the history of mirrors?"  And they show up right at the top of searches.  From my early blogging experiences,  I know there's a market for people willing to write such breezy answers to get people to look at the ads that surround the posts.  Finding the meat is getting harder.  But they all say that mirrors go back thousands of years.

I did find one longer post at SIRC (Social Issues Research Centre) that looked at the impact of mirrors from a lot of different perspectives - age, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.  This snippet has relevance to my interest in this:

"Age
Children: Female dissatisfaction with appearance – poor body-image – begins at a very early age. Human infants begin to recognise themselves in mirrors at about two years old. Female humans begin to dislike what they see only a few years later. The latest surveys show very young girls are going on diets because they think they are fat and unattractive. In one American survey, 81% of ten-year-old girls had already dieted at least once. A recent Swedish study found that 25% of 7 year old girls had dieted to lose weight – they were already suffering from 'body-image distortion', estimating themselves to be larger than they really were. Similar studies in Japan have found that 41% of elementary school girls (some as young as 6) thought they were too fat. Even normal-weight and underweight girls want to lose weight."