Funny Weather

The sun came out today and just in time.  High pressure system from the north and it fills me with a joy that is hard to express after weeks of rain.  Just to see the sun and have the rain stop beating on our roof, feels like a Hawaiian vacation no matter that it's 38 degrees. 

I love listening to jokes. To get myself through the last month of solid rain I started reading jokes, and telling them.  Rather than listen to my friends talk about the weather I asked if they had heard any new jokes. Young Finn Straley and I like to talk about jokes and how they work.    He sent me this one by a master joke writer by the name of Jack Handy formerly of  SNL.

“To me, clowns aren't funny. In fact, they're kinda scary. I've wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus and a clown killed my dad.” 

Now I'm not going to parse this out to see why it is funny.  I just think it is.  What I love most about this joke is how well written it is.    I've tried to tell it several times from memory but it you get one word or phrase wrong in the telling, the joke falls absolutely flat.    Comedians, like my son, spend years trying to learn the secrete of this. They talk about timing; the "set up' and "the turn", the "payoff."  It's almost as if a great joke has the requirements of a fine haiku.  Which I think in a way they do, 

I think funny stories in America almost always have a three act format, or three beats. You know this of course, the duck walks into the bar two times asking for a gin and tonic, until the bartender gets upset and tells him that he is going to nail his bill to the bar if he asks again.  So of course on the third time the duck walks in and asks for some nails.... when the bartender doesn't have any nails... boom... the duck asks for a gin and tonic.   Three chapters, three beats. "The Rule of Three".  

I've read in oral histories, many stories in the Native American Traditions have a four part structure.  Four directions,  two pairs,  a balance in the cosmos.  Native stories will often have the Coyote coming back three times before the pay off.  Just different. 

The horrible thing is that although there is clearly a structure... the joke structure is slippery and can be changed by intonation and context.  Unlike haiku, jokes are not so easily prescribed.  No hard fast rules.   

 A cowboy walks into a bar and sees a sign hanging over the door that reads: CHEESEBURGER: $6.50 CHICKEN SANDWICH: $7.50 HAND JOB: $10.00

 He walks up to the bar and beckons one of the three exceptionally attractive women serving drinks. "Can I help you?" she asks. "Excuse me  mam,  I was wondering," says the cowboy, "Are you the one who gives the hand jobs?"

 "Yes," she purrs. "I am."

 The cowboy takes off his hat and says,"Well, I'm wondering if you would wash your hands because I would like a cheeseburger."

I love this one too.  So, still a basic three act play, the structure is here.  But here is another great thing that humor does,  the suspension of disbelief of the totally implausible premise.  As a story teller if you get them buying into your dumb premise.  (a restaurant that would have hand jobs on the menu) your audience is starting to laugh right from the beginning.  You've hooked them.  Good jokes are somehow irresistible. Then in this joke once they are hooked, the joke takes a different turn for the payoff.  

When I heard the joke it wasn't a cowboy.  I added that.  I added that because I happen to know that cowboys while rough, and they like talking about sex, they are mostly pretty fastidious about their food.  It just rang true to me that the man was a cowboy. 

There is a whole complicated issue of what men find funny and what women find funny.  Of course imbedded power assumptions can get both men and women riled up.  I believe this is because there always has and always will be, a great deal of tension between men and women, and where there is tension there is the need to find relief through humor.  When I was young I thought rough sex talk was wholly the providence of men.  Of course that wasn't true,  I just hadn't been allowed into the company of women who talked openly about sex.  I wasn't intimate with women who told funny stories to relief the tension of their lives of subjugation, but of course they were out there.  Cowgirls I met were rough and told ribald stories, and of course bartenders and other working women told rough jokes in which men were the object of their ridicule.   Always, where there is conflict there is the potential for a good joke.  Now,  of course women play on the same field as men when it comes to humor,  even if they sometimes don't get the same respect in the world of comedy.

 Here is something else weird that the last joke illustrates:  Hard, percussive sounds are somehow just naturally funnier than soft sounds.   If the cowboy asks for a hamburger at the payoff.  It's just not as funny as "Cheeseburger".  Cheeseburger is a funnier word than Hamburger. Don't ask me why.  Comedians say that "K" sounds are funnier that any other.  Some say this is because of the Yiddish influence in American humor.  The explosive and guttural sounds of that language had a lot to do with early stand up comedy that came to us from Vaudeville. 

In one of my favorite movies, "Caddyshack"  Rodney Dangerfield was given a line to say,  something like "Hey that gopher just stole my ball!"  but he ad-libbed a much funnier line when he said,  "Hey, that Kangaroo, just stole my ball!"   Try it with any other animal.   Kangaroo is just funnier.

Humor wants us to resolve our conflicts in ways that are outrageously  silly and life affirming.  Sure there is dark humor and plenty of jokes about death, but they are told by survivors.  When I was little my parents took in eastern european families who had survived the War.  I was very young, but I do remember there was a lot of laughing around our table.   Humor is a survival technique. Many comedians are sad and frustrated people.  Their lives were rich in conflict.   

Can you train yourself to be funny?  I have no idea.  There are clearly ways to be funnier.  Joke telling is a proven therapy for autistic children.  Telling jokes opens up their sense of emotional relationship.  Teach them to tell jokes and they begin to see how they can participate in an emotional world.  One which might remain essentially mysterious to them but one that they can master and enjoy.  There are very few rules for how to make people laugh.   Finn tells me that being funny in public requires an instinct that you hone by doing it over and over and over again, getting up and telling a joke and seeing what the reaction is then going back and editing it.   Comedy is not hierarchical  because the audience is empowered to make the judgment.  Funniness is anarchic and mysterious, there are rules but they are so evasive, as to be almost maddening.  A good comedian should be able to make any audience laugh.   What is funny?   It's almost like asking how to spin gold from straw. 

 Three mice are sitting in a bar in a very rough part of town. They are bragging about how tough they are.  The first mouse says, "When I see a trap, I lay down on it trip the latch and catch the bar in my teeth, then do bench presses with the bar, to work up an appetite,  Then I eat the cheese and leave. 

The second mouse says, "That's nothing,  when I see some Rat Poison, I take it home and grind it up into my coffee so I have a good buzz going all day long."  Then the two mice look at the third.

The third mouse says, "This is a bunch of Baloney.  I've got to get out of here,  I've got to go home and fuck the cat." 

Crass yes, but something about joke telling ties us to some physical and much older part of ourselves, it may be the one vital oral tradition that is still alive today.  Men and women telling jokes about each other, is an ancient art form that ties us all the way back to myth, when we saw ourselves as animals.  Again what people forget about the oral traditions, what people forget about Native American culture is how funny the stories can be, and how all people like to get together and laugh.  We all have this in common.

This silliness, wordplay and gentle combat is what makes us able to tolerate each other, even when we spend six weeks listening to the rain.   

Clear night, half a moon

sits above my writing shed

waiting for her cow.  

 

jhs--Sitka

No Answer

Strange and depressing weather, like the opening of an old horror movie.  A friend calls in the middle of January and says in a voice tinged with wonder that it looks like his Rhubarb is starting to come up.  Our grass is a sickly yellow and the rain continues to fall while the clouds clog the coast, for days now, weeks possibly I can't seem to remember. The only good thing to report is there seems to be more light in the evening, even if it is a weak and sickly kind.

I decided I wanted to break the mood of my last few blogs and try to write something a bit more upbeat and cheerful this week.  Maybe something even what you would call celebratory, but I don't know that I can:  an old friend was found dead in his trailer last week. His neighbors didn't notice him coming or going for a few days and they became concerned and they called the police.  When they went him they found him dead of natural causes.  

Ron was a big grumpy man. He liked you to think he was dangerous.  He liked you to think he was crazy.  But the truth was he was brilliant and sensitive.  Since the time he laid down his memories of his service on the Mekong river in the late sixties I don't think he ever slept more than a few hours  in a night.  Ever since I knew him he didn't own a bed.  He slept on a recliner surrounded by books.  He studied Native American Literature, and U.S. History.  He had been a History and Lit. teacher himself in a small college in Oregon, a lifetime ago.  Like Big Daddy himself he hated all forms of "Mendacity" and bureaucratic bullshit.  He didn't generate a lot of garbage and what waste he did, he recycled and took care of himself and he didn't feel he should pay his garbage can fee if he didn't need a garbage can.  The losing battle was waged for years.  

Ron liked to drink and make calls.  Sometimes he would call to talk about my wife's whale research.  He was fascinated by it.  He was fascinated by her, for while Ron could be hateful about women in positions of bureaucratic authority, he was a goofy romantic about strong women who worked independently. I know several woman who took his calls as he rambled and asked questions.  He was funny and doting, flirtations, I assume, but not creepy, for he genuinely admired these women.  He told me so.  Ron also loved cats, and guns, and beer, and Wagner, and Beethoven, and the heaviest of Heavy Metal Music.  He had a radio show for a time and he would be banned from the station at times, but he was made for radio with his gruff voice and his willingness to do all night shifts and play anything from Sun-Ra, to The Ring Cycle, to Cannibal Corpse. But then of course there were some screeds which didn't find a suitable audience.  

I once tried to see if Ron would stop talking on his own when he called.  It was ten at night and he called to talk.  I let him run,  it was good stuff mostly, I'm not sure I remember all of the topics that night but surely he mentioned: The idiocy of the Forest Service, Fish and Game, City of Sitka, All Government agencies.  The possibility of his running for office,  advice from me on computers and dictation software, his desire to write a book, The depth that Sperm whales feed,  the size of their brains, how a Sperm whale could certainly beat that fucking freak Bobby Fischer,  what a great little darling our friend Lilly was,  the war tactics of the Lakota,  and the superior intellect of Hunter S. Thompson.  The point being by 11:30 he was no where near slowing down and I was running out of juice.  

Ron had dozens of friends he did this with.  He probably spent thousands of hours on the telephone. I suspect it was his greatest release valve.  In all those calls he probably wrote a dozen books, and gave them to his friends to distribute in their retelling.

Some men never conquer their demons, but some get close.  Horrible things once experienced cannot be completely forgotten.  All a person can do who has been visited by darkness is to reach out towards the light that he sees in others.  That's what Ron was doing in his phone calls.

Ron was a big guy and complicated.  This is an inadequate tribute to him, because I didn't know him all that well.  He was hard to help, because help was not what he was asking for.  Alaska was a good place for him,  Montana and parts of Idaho and Washington are still good, I suppose Texas too, Big Country  where men who have seen too much can have room to ramble about like the wild, big hearted bulls they became.  

 

          We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.  I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like Huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles and hour with the top down to Las Vegas,  And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus!What are these Godamn animals?" Then it was quiet again.  My attorney had taken his shirt off and was porting beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process.  "What the hell are you yelling about?" he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wrap around Spanish sunglasses.  "Never mind." I said.  "It's your turn to drive."  I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway.  No point mentioning the bats, I thought.  The poor bastard will see them soon enough." -----------Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas    Hunter S. Thompson

 

Rain on the roof

I look at my phone

but it does not ring

 

jhs.....Sitka, 

 

 

 

 

 

Winter Holds Its Breath

Hazy clouds and about 38 degrees.  No rain, nor snow,  some sun off and on. The grass still is mostly green and the mothers day Rhododendron have leaves curled like toilette paper rolls.  Here in Sitka the season just doesn't know what to do. 

The news of the world is sad, reading about the killings in Paris: with the attendant protests which carry on their back some of the original racist and anti muslim sentiment.  Fear, and hatred, the trumpeting of universal and unbreakable principles... always ring with the preamble to martial music and war.  But how can we go to war against terror, against an emotion? 

I can only imagine one way, through renewed effort of courage and understanding.  Steadfastness, not in the principles, but in the flawed everyday carrying out of the expression of our principles.  

That's why I was sad that the Paris perpetrators were killed.  I had hoped they were to be captured and given lawyers.  At least one should have had a woman lawyer.  This trial would have been long and talky.  The families of the dead would have been given the opportunity to scream their curses at living  ears, and in time say bitter prayers along side.  To my mind I would want to see families of the prisoners get their chance to talk about their faith and disavow violence yet, again in time,  try to explain what it feels like to see your prophet mocked in a country that does not welcome your faith or your practice.  In my vision of justice I would have this trial go on and on....and eventually have the French people take the verdicts together and see that justice is something that is hard to build together on this earth and not something that is meted out by a few individuals with guns.  

But of course this is just me.  It seems the world likes stories that fit into film scripts... revenge stories...faster solutions.  The wold likes men with guns dispensing justice.  I have been guilty of this myself.  There is nothing like a revenge fantasy to sell copies.   

I am in my second reading of the Qur'an, and have just finished a fine book about the history of Al-Qeada, called The Looming Tower by Jeffery Wright.  I found The Tower a fascinating and well written book, but plan to keep digging.  What Wright says is, the tale of Islamic extremism in the modern world started with Sayyid Qutb  in the 1950s in Egypt.  A relatively obscure writer with relatively few followers.  The idea is a reaction against Western Colonialism certinally  but  Qutb also evolved his ideas from an interesting linguistic reality in the nature of Arabic and it's relationship to the Qur'an.  

This, as a writer, is what interests me about peoples relationship to this text ... but bear with me, because as you will see, I'm no expert here. The Qur'an is pretty much everything on the Arabian Penninsula as far as written culture.  It's hard to overestimate it's importance.  The rules of Arabic grammar, tense, and syntax evolved to accommodate the reading of the Qur'an.  The Angel Gabriel comes to the Prophet first in Medina then in Mecca and speaks into his ear.  The Angel reveals the word of God.  Remember this is the God of Abraham.  Same God of the Old Testament, of Issac, and Noah and Jesus.  Mohammad, the Prophet praises Jesus profusely, in the Qur'an. Much of the Holy text is written in the second person: "You, prophet... you do this... you must tell the people this" in the voice of the Angel of the lord.  but sometimes the Angel is so filled with the fervor of God's word he starts speaking in Godly voice,  "And the Heavens will feel your voice..."   The Angel tells the Prophet how to unify the people at the temple. He tells the Prophet in the most detailed language, how to do real estate trans actions,  Divcorces, Pretty much everything the people need to know.  Why?  To bring them together under one leader in one church. For at this time, some six hundred years after the birth of Christ, most of the people on the Arabian peninsula were not Jews or Christians, nor Muslims but were pantheists believing in multiple gods, some of local sects, some of Roman, or Greek origin.  This caused distention, and also disruption in politics and the economy.  

It became tradition carried on to this day for the followers of the Prophet Mohammad  to memorize large sections  of the Prophets teaching. Some still, by adulthood are able to memorize the entire Holy text.  Now, imagine that.... the voice of the Angel of God, talking directly to you, as if you were a Prophet.  Repeated over and over into your mind, when you were say 7 or 8, Until you remembered every word of a three hundred page text that encapsulated the given law and wisdom of your culture..   

This is not just a book.  This is a deep cultural identity.  Qutb believed and wrote that nothing more was needed in life BUT the Qur'an.   He lived and studied for a time in Greeley Colorado after World War II and he found the new western world to be silly and licentious where he found the life prescribed by the Qur'an was dignified, masculine, Godly, and ordered.  Western, democratic capitalism was rapacious, pansexual, and unGodly.  To Qutb's mind the two cultures were mutually exclusive, they could not coexist. Liberal democracy could only pollute the vitality of Islam.  In 1966 Sayyid Qutb was happy to be hanged in Cairo for his opposition to the opening of Egypt's overtures to the Western developers. .  His teachings have become the foundation of Islamic extremism around the globe ever since:  one very quite and dignified writer who studied in Greeley, Colorado, set the tuning fork humming that would topple the World Trade Center.

I suppose, as a person who respects writing, I should take heart that Ideas Matter.  Writing Matters. How a piece of text is written, the choice of person, first, second or third, is a critical  decision. And I do...because if anything is true this must be:  The words of one Living God appears to have brought us to the brink of war then the words of the same Living God should be able to bring us back from that brink.  And it will be brought back by the words of Silly, and Profane artists, Women, Intellectuals, Jews, and Christians, Palestinians, Native Americans, Homosexuals, and all the multitudes of human and non-human I cannot think of that this One God surely must speak through if this God created and is responsible for them all.  They all, even the hummingbird at my feeder must have a say in this matter of world peace.  Even the scallop on the rocks, and the baby asleep in the trailer down the road.  Surly God, (praise be his name) has not forgotten her.  This baby may grow up to have the answer saving us all. 

God Bless all this love that cannot be killed, by anyone, anywhere, and long may it be shared, freely.   

 

A night so dark

         I close my eyes 

to see some light. 

 

jhs---Sitka

.  

 

Abundance

2015 begins with a high pressure system of northerly weather: whitecaps breaking on the rocks and a hard wind scratching her nails down the grey-green sea.  The ground is frozen today and a Blue Heron stands coiled up on the tide flat, watching, watching.  

I apologize for my absence from the site but I got sick on my last day in Las Vegas with some kind of traveling cold which I felt compelled to share with my loved ones, resulting in a lot of snoozing, sneezing, laying about and mutual bringing of soup.  

Christmas came and went, and it gave me a chance to think about our lucky life of abundance.  Let me finish with Las Vegas.  The reason for the trip was to eat at this one restaurant:  Joel Robuschon.  I had read an article about it years ago in the New Yorker, about how the the builders of the MGM Grand had built a mansion for him in the Casino and he had created a 5 star restaurant in an attempt to make the most exquisite dining experience anywhere in the world.  Foodies decried it as unworthy of the title: "Disneyesque"  "slight-of-hand"  Others said he was successful in making the best food from fresh ingredients, with the best staff, ect...  I told myself that if I ever had some money to spare I would spend it with some people I loved at this joint.  And I did.  And it was the most fun I ever had eating.  

Of course it is slight of hand.  They get you a little drunk on the magnificent Champagne  and the attentive staff who will not let your water glass go empty.  The twenty five kinds of freshly made bread, the cold corn bisque with fresh sweet cream, to start, and then push on to all kinds of delicacies, that don't taste like any flavors I could recognize, neither salt nor fat nor sugar, but all were delectable.   We laughed out loud with each course.  We were not trying to play it cool.  The staff started laughing with us.  The chef came out to see what all the hub bub was from these hicks.  We told him our stories.  And when Jan told him about Sperm whales and Black Cod he brought us extra deserts.  (also because our black cod was four minutes late to the table which he was desperately sorry for)  By the end we were all friends.  The Chef came out and gave us bags of food to take back with us, along with extra courses and deserts.  The deserts were miracles of invention.  A Soufflé  warm from the oven that they put home made ice cream into the top at the table melted down into the chocolate-rasperry  goodness. Finn took a bite and looked at me and said,  " I think I might cry."  Emily asked in all seriousness.  "Do you think it would be all right if I went back there and kissed the dessert chef?" 

We left happy, and stuffed,  The check was about twice the amount as I spent on my first car:  a van that I had for about a month then the engine caught fire and I left in a little down in Eastern Washington.  This meal was a much better value. 

Now, would the meal have been so good if we had pulled the exact same food out of styrofoam containers and eaten it at home?  Of course not.  Meals are events, defined by setting and expectations.  Anyone who has been hunting or gathering and eating their catch on a windy beach or around a campfire know.  Wild food tastes better outside.  Grandmothers pies tastes better in her kitchen.  Context is everything in storytelling and in meals.  The story being told at Joel Robuschon is one of european high culture.  It is a trip to an imagined Paris, granted one that only may exist in the mind of a tourist to Las Vegas, but it is a spectacularly decadent Paris  and a Paris, where the waiters are exceedingly kind. 

But I have to say, even if you pulled this food out of a plastic container it would still be unbelievably good.  I will dream about the one perfectly cooked asparagus tip with pate and an artichoke heart appetizer, until the day I die. 

Now, let me tell you about another meal.  I worked almost every day of the Holidays.  I did not work the 25th or the 26th.  The days I'm at the office around 2:30 my friend from prison calls me.  It is part of his schedule.  He has a night job as a custodian, so he sweeps and cleans up. For this he earns about $83 a month for which he is grateful.  He had been serving his time earlier in southeastern Alaska and now he is much further north.  When he was arrested two years ago he was taken directly from high school and they didn't let him get his coat.  Department of Corrections no longer allows anyone to give inmates clothes so they have to buy clothes from their commissary. Commissary has to cover all toiletries, towels, shampoos, soaps, over the counter medicines, and any snack food, you are allowed to have.  Clothes in most prisons can only be ordered a few times a year.  My friend is in a place where it is commonly below zero.  I sent him money this year so he could buy wither clothes the one time he could order them.  He called me last week to say that he got his long underwear and his winter pants.  He was very happy.  

He was also happy.  He was spending twenty dollars on a Christmas Feast.  I asked him about it.  He said his "Cellie" or cell mate is getting out in February and this makes my friend a little bit sad.  My friend is young and somewhat vulnerable.  His Cellie is 62 and well respected.  He doesn't like people coming into their cell and that is fine with my friend.  I believe the prison authorities paired them up to keep my young friend safe.  For the Feast, my friend is making Nachos, he has three cans of Chili,  four bags of corn chips, two cans of refried beans, and one can of jalepeano flavored squeeze cheese.  His Celliie wants meat so he chopped up a can of Spam and added that into the mix.  They heated it all up in the microwave on their section where their cell is and they celebrated the holiday by themselves. They ate on greasy paper plates with plastic forks back on their bunks in the solitude of their cell.  They decided to drink water and save money. This was their Christmas Feast. The last one they will have together.  

I asked my friend how it was, and he said, most uncharacteristically: "Magnificent,"  and I'm sure it was.

 

Ice cold wind blowing

my neighbor calls to tell me 

he saw hummingbirds!

. 

 

jhs--Sitka, Ak 

 

 

What Makes 1 + 1 = 2 Difficult ?

So wet and rainy the last few weeks in Sitka, Jan and I beat feet out of town.  I'm typing this from the 35th floor of a hotel in Las Vegas.  We are going to meet young son Finn and his lovely woman Emily here tonight.  He turns 26 on Wednesday and we are going to go to see as many comedians as we can.  More about Vegas next time.  

I need some laughs.  The days have been particularly dark, and when night comes it seems like it just sucks the light right out of our car headlights while we drive the road home... some sort of supernatural darkness created by the rain and the December tilt of the earth.  It happens every year and every year it surprises me.  I don't even mind it that much, I'm prone to darkness, as you know, it just surprises me when it comes around.  

All the news surprises me as well.  The elections, and people, as we travel asking me about the elections in Alaska.  What does it mean?  Who is this new Governor you elected?  Who is this new Senator?  What does it mean?  

"We will have to wait and see."  I tell them.  "Almost everything depends on the price of oil, it's down now, but who knows for how long?"  Mark Begich our Senator lost, and may be the last Democrat we see in the senate from Alaska for a while.  His vote passed Obamacare some say, but his vote also scuttled the gun reform bill.  He was for opening up the Arctic Refuge like a gutted fish.

Bill Walker, was a Republican, ran as an Independent was embraced by the Democrats mostly because he could beat the Republican incumbent and he wanted to extend the Federal funding of Obamacare to the poor of Alaska, and he won.  Labels don't mean much in Alaskan politics.  Guns, Oil and Money matter in Alaska. 

"Fungible" is a fun word.  I like it. It means how a commodity can  flow through various  markets easily by being swapped for equal units of other commodities:  water: for hydro power: for oil: for money, ect...  It depends on comparing comparable worth.  In Alaska we are dependent on  forces beyond our control, we puff and we blow like a big bad wolf but we are still in many ways a colonial entity, trying to act like we are the boss.  

In the world economy who is the boss?  Of course real power too, is fungible.  The argument goes that there is becoming a ruling elite of wealth, but in Alaska who is that ruling elite? Elections on substantial issues are won and lost by relatively small numbers. Is money really deciding these elections? Enormous amounts of money are spent on advertising but is that money effective in such a small market as Alaska?  I don't know.  Ask me again, if Don Young gets elected next time.   

Power is fungible, power when thwarted can expresses itself as rage and racism. Here is where guns come into the equation.  When individuals try to equalize, face the rage in themselves or in a community, they turn to their guns. Guns make individuals feel powerful.  In the wild west they called the six gun "the old equalizer".   Gun people take this as an article of faith, their right to carry a gun protects them from the excesses of Government, but what happens when Government agents use guns against the people in difficult, trying circumstances?   Here again is another question that became horribly complicated in the news these last few weeks.  

I have no idea what happened at the shooting in Ferguson. It is clear to me from as far away as Alaska however that there is a breakdown of trust between the races in Ferguson both before, during, and after that shooting. I hate to say it but the normal institutions, the grand jury, the local police, the DA's office, were destined to fail, unless they had had some kind of awakening since the shooting.  They needed outside help on this one.  They needed a special investigations unit and a special prosecutor. They needed community supports as well as an impartial outsider to make a clear eyed judgement that the community could look at together and accept.  

Guns, power, the death of a young black man, and the life of a white police officer: money and politics, the cost of oil and the future of a wild and beautiful state:  all of this flows through the fungibility of power and the complex determination of the equality of people and things.

How do we know that 1 + 1 = 2 ?    We have to agree on it.  That's the hard part of the equation.  

 

 

Clouds in the desert

distant sirens, blue lights flash

thirty stories down. 

 

jhs--Las Vegas

 

Charismatic Megafauna

Clear, cold fall day: there is frost on the ground.  The docks are slick.  Hunters are out this Veterans day looking for deer, though the snow has not driven them down to the beaches yet. The sky today is a hazy blue and the humpback whales are diving in Sitka Sitka Sound feeding on the krill and herring fattening up before their trip to the warm waters to breed.  

Last weekend was the 18th annual Whalefest held here in Sitka, which Jan helps to organize.  It is a celebration of the marine environment that includes a week of Scientists in the Schools, and a Sea Chantyman for the little kids who combines art, music and science.  There are art classes and art shows and film festivals, plus a talent show, and an entire weekend of scientific lectures about the marine world and ecology of the North Pacific right out our front door.  There are two whale watching cruises, one on Saturday and another on Sunday.  It is a fun time usually and this year it was particularly good because the storm held off and the Sunday cruise was perfect conditions for seeing some 25 to thirty humpback whales feeding, and a few sea otters lazing around at their ease in the kelp beds, all while the white peaks reflected down on the calm green seas.  

As the festival goes on there are more and more visitors come from out of town to participate, and because it happens mostly on the weekend lots of locals still make it every year. Older people who have given up their skiffs come out on the whale watching excursions to see the big animals again, and young couples with their babies bundled up often bring them out for their fist safe trip on the water before they begin their lifetime at sea.

I'm struck again and again how most teaching, how almost everything thing in the public sphere has a little bit of subversion in it.  Grab them with the Megafauna and teach them the lesson of interconnectedness. And the big animals do draw us in.  People come from all over the world to stand at the rail, and when the whales rise, their faces never fail to change, no matter their age, to that childlike, trance-like state of wonder.

Has it always been that way?  I'm not sure.  Certainly we have a narrative that goes along with whales now.  Whales represent a story.... a "saved from the brink of extinction by the cruel exploitation of man"  narrative that is both true and compelling.  People like to see the humpbacks in healthy numbers, I think, partly because it gives them hope for their own species.  That is part of the narrative of the whale,  "look... they are not extinct, we did save the whales... maybe we can save the planet."   My tone should not read as sarcastic here.  I am all in favor of evidence of hope.  

But... (there always is a "but" isn't there)  there may be some evidence that there never was as healthy a population of humpbacks in Sitka Sound in the past.  When you artificially knock down all the whales in a system then they all rush back, some may rush in for whatever reason and crowd the others out.  Jan thinks, from her reading of the old whaling data that there were a lot more fin whales in southeastern Alaska than humpbacks in the old days.   Killer whale were always here.  Part of the reason she thinks that is the relative absence of humpbacks compared to killer whales in the Tlingit lore.  But this is speculation and not published anywhere.  It's mostly just dinner conversation between her and me.  

The point is we don't really know what is "natural" and "pure" even in the wild ocean.  When the Russians knocked out the sea otters they changed the ecology of the coastline drastically and created a "new normal" that had lots more crab and abalone and less kelp forests.  Maybe less habitat, for little fish that the whales like.  Who knows?  

What I'm trying to say is this:  we think we learned the narrative surrounding these whales from each other.  We think we learned it from the captain of the Sea Shepard, or from other environmental activists, Judy Collins or Jimmy Buffet.  But what if we learned it very directly and specifically in a non woo-woo way from the animals themselves? 

We know from our own experience with animals: horses and dogs and cats, that animals experience pain.. and from that that they experience something very parallel to our experience of fear and memory.  Taking a dog to a vet after a painful procedure)  We know they recall and react.  We know from watching animals in the wild that they have social interaction,  whales and feeding, whales and singing.   And when you have been whale watching enough you know.. that whales can leave when boats come in the area or they can stay.  We know from observation of propeller scars on their backs that whales have been hit by boats plenty of times, but yet they stay around boats,  They can, if they want to, disappear.  But sometimes they don't.  

Now, I don't know what goes on in their heads, but I do know what goes on in mine.  I've learned more about these animals from looking at them.  I've learned more about graceful movement, and gentleness from their actions than anything I've ever read about them.  By being in a thirteen foot inflatable skiff and having a forty foot female swim three feet underneath my feet I've learned more about forbearance and delicacy than anything published by Greenpeace, and sitting with Jan one late fall day recording male song I think I felt more about music and trying to make connection than any musicology tract, and I've learned that because the animals consciously allowed me to learn that.  Just as they consciously allowed the whale watchers on the cruises to experience their moments of wonder.   

All I'm saying is don't be ashamed of going to the source but just don't try to own too much of it.  Like, do the whales know you,  and are they aware of their gift to you.  Forget that, just love the gift. Life is essentially a mystery, that's what makes it beautiful.  

I met a man at a whale conference who told me that he was swimming with the whales and he was able to communicate with whales.  "Ah..."  I said..."You are so lucky..."  then he went on to say that it started out as "telepathic, binary communications of 'yes'  'no'  clicks but now", he said,  "it has blossomed into full blown transmission of dreams and desires."   

"Wow!" I stammered... "You are really, really, lucky" was all I could think of saying.  He had some hand drawn notes and charts and obviously wanted to talk with me for a long time but I told him that I had an appointment and I gave him my address and phone number, which he never used.  Maybe he the telephone too cumbersome.  

But I've thought of the poor guy often and I feel bad for him.  He has jumped over an important step in his relationship with animals.  In his delusional state he's violated the barrier between our species and it's that barrier which creates the space to make the communication... what?  So mannerly,  and exciting I suppose.  Being so close to a whale would not be nearly so wondrous if you where in a Vulcan mind link with them.  The fact that you are different and separate, makes them worthy of your awe. 

Not understanding them completely puts the "Mega" in the megafauna. 

 

Now I know

everything about you

but the problem is

I can neither vote

nor abstain.  

 

jhs---Sitka

The Land Of The Ends And Beginnings

Squalls coming through hard: rain beating down on the mud and bouncing back towards the sky,  then slumping into puddles to reflect some sunshine.  Halloween has come and gone with the sugar buzz and the kids walking down the middle of the street with their buckets of candy.

This is the second blog about my California trip.  I have been reading The Guns Of August  about the beginning of World War I and there is something about the author's famous and beautiful first paragraph that keeps coming back to me as I think about California.  Here is the opening of the Guns of August, 

"So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of  1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.  In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun.  After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highness's, seven queens-- four dowager and three regnants--- and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries.  Together they represented seventy nations in the great assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and of its kind the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace,but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again."

 

The paragraph captures the beginning of the end of the era of royal imperialism.  The world of interconnected families which controlled the world financial holdings was about to come mired down in the trenches of Flanders, then into the ridiculous looting of the German economy and the revolutions of the east and west rolling into the greatest world wide killing events of the twentieth century.

Such a beautiful paragraph. The splendor of the age of Royalty and the hint of sentimentality over its coming to an end.  So, what in the heck does this have to do with Los Angeles?  Well... I told you I this was about the light of the world I saw down there, and so it is.  I was lucky to see the beautiful world of Hollywood, and some of the beautiful people.  And they are beautiful, and smart.  My country mouse family were comped night in a beautiful Spa in Santa Barbara.  Everywhere the eye fell were flowers in bloom: Bougainvillea, and Hyacinth. Lovely birds which have long since disappeared from Alaska.  Even in time of drought sounds of water running though limestone run ways. This part of my family makes television shows and they are quite successful.  They are some of the  women in the business of creating our national dream worlds.  Our national secrete companions, and I was lucky to see them at their charming ease. 

My niece who is a dear, smart woman and incredibly savvy writes about sex and dread in the modern world, and quite well as far as I can see.  She also writes about pop culture which is often the subtext of everything in Hollywood.  On her birthday evening  wore an incredible gown and had undergone some sort of skin scrub at the spa.  When I hugged her her cheek was a firm and soft as an athletic baby.  Her phone buzzed and her assistant hovered.  She was off to the airport early in the morning after her birthday for the wrap party for only one of her TV series.  

Is it just me or is Popular American Culture always at the end of an era?  The conservatives always believe we are at the end of the liberal disastrous experiment begun by FDR.  The liberals believe we are at the end of the disastrous, profligate lifestyle as evidence by, you name it: ...  global warming, cheap oil, ocean acidification. "This is the END, my only friend... the end." The Doors sang..   and someday they will be right.

 And Hollywood is ready.  Hollywood writes all the dreams, produced from every ounce of anxiety created from the certainty of this.  Dream makers, love the kings and they love royalty and have a secrete sentimentality in which they try to recreate it.  For as Shakespeare knew, Kings and Queens were responsible in the drama of their country's plight.  They fell on the sword in the final act. The story teller needed them to do that  and they also need the war. 

In our national literature Huck Finn went west. Nick Carraway went west, even the actual man Wavonka the creator of the Medicine Shirt Dance, sparked the uprising at Wounded Knee ended up as an actor in Hollywood silent films.  Faulkner, Hammet, Fitzgerald, Chandler, all worked here.  When old worlds end you come to Hollywood, to create the apocalyptic songs of warning and live the life of the lotus eaters.  "If it be the one place that we, the inconstant ones are consistently homesick for it is chiefly because it dissolves in water," as Auden said of the dissolute ruins of Capri.  

Not that Hollywood is a ruin.  Far from it, it is vibrant and energetic where hard working people get paid with more work.

So, what am I saying?  I'm saying if I were a different man, younger and more attuned to the stories of dialogue, and character development.  I would do what ever it took to be a television writer right now.  We are teetering on the brink of something, this is a feeling I came away with from being in LA, there is very little water and there are so many, many people and cars that it feels like some kind of change is in the wind... and all the dark clouds and lives tearing asunder on television seem to be warning us of something.

And that little box is reaching people right now and people are telling amazing stories through it:   The Wire, Treme, Orange is the New Black,  Girlfriends Guide to Divorce,,,, (perhaps though I haven't seen it.)  Anyway... If I were a young man or woman I would try and get get into that racket.  There are smart people there, who are moving hearts and minds, they capturing the fears of the era,  and by doing so they give us the only warning signs to what may lay ahead, which is all The Guns Of August ever tried to do, there was the end of kings... we are living in our own end of kings and queens and these writers and story makers are recreating the dreams that will tell us something about our fears.... and in payment these makers get to live by the sea where, apparently the flowers bloom all year round, and the birds sing by your door forever. 

Hollywood.  A person could do worse at the end of the world. 

 

 

Slick, silver clouds

spraying the hard rain to earth

like tears, like snow.... almost. 

 

jhs...Sitka

What Comes To This Tree?

It's a beautiful Fall day in Sitka.  Distinct puffy clouds as if they were drawn by cartoonists in a blue, blue sky.  The wind off the ocean is not menacing, but gentle.  Yesterday people were working on their costumes for the big dance and there was a run on fabric tape and cheap hair dye at the five and dime store.  How could the air smell like apples if there are no apples on the trees?  It must be my imagination.  

Yesterday was Pablo Picasso's birthday but no one went as him to the Stardust Ball.  I have a favorite quote of his;  once, someone asked him why Paris was the center of the art world back in the early twentieth Century and he said, rather obscurely, "The Orange naturally comes to the Orange tree,  never the Apple."   I love that.  I don't know why.  

Last weekend Jan and I made a trip to Los Angeles to visit young Finn Straley.  This was Jan's birthday wish for herself, to see her son and watch him perform and to go to a health spa and get out of town for a bit.  My gift to her was to calmly, and uncomplainingly, go along and do the driving.

Living in Alaska, it is easy to get haughty about places like L.A.  People get damn near snobbish and rude about it, when Finn is back here and he tells people he lives there he is met with distain and sour faces.  More than that, what is irksome to him now, he has told me, is a sense of outright moral superiority of some Alaskans who feel that just because they have gutted a few fish and have slept out twice in a tent, they have been anointed by the nature Gods to look down now on all urban people who drive cars.  I have to say that was his father off and on during his growing up I'm sure.

So, I'd like to write a bit of a cautious apology to Los Angeles here.  I'm going to do it in two parts, because I felt like I really did see two parts of the city: the light and the dark.  I'll start with the dark, of course, because that's what always draws me and it's what I love best, or at least what I'm used to. 

Dumped at the airport... and we pick up a brand new rental car.  This I always like: some sparkling new Japanese marvel full size that costs us only $140. for five days.  It is nicer than any car we have ever owned.  Jan sits with her iphone and navigates.  I have taken a half a dose more of my anxiety medication on the plane and I am mellow but sharp,  No alcohol, only caffeine drinks on board.  I have the perfect blend running through my bloodstream.  The first thing I always notice about diving in LA as opposed to Seattle is... they really thought about this road design...  It is a car culture from the ground up.  Okay, there are things not to like about that but if you have to drive.... which you do... it's nice that streets flow into one another and most of them have signs that tell you ahead of time..   Driving.  First thing to remember, keep the fuck up and make up your mind or don't.  Speed Limits are apparently advisory for a time in the distant past... unless there is a police car in the area.  If you miss the exit don't get in a snit.  You are on an adventure.  On this trip particularly... the birthday girl is to be happy at all times, and that it the prime directive.  That's easy enough for me.   The chemical balance is cool.  The mock orange smell in the air mixes with exhaust is tonic, fried food, and salt air,  I don't miss any exits.  No one honks.  I'm driving like a pro.  Towards our first destination my dyslexic brain has trouble sorting out the separation from 110 and 101.  Totally my fault and not the navigator's.  She is an angel and when I miss the exit she doesn't get mad and start one of those domestic blaming whisper tension explosion fights.   We just pull off into Chinatown and she resets the iPhone.  (yeah I love that now too) and I wander through the fried fat dark streets to find a way to double back. I cut back up and under.

We look to the left and there,as if a hallucination, in the middle of Chinatown is a Coyote. Not running but standing on a piece of dusty ground surrounded by concrete.  It is panting.  Looking very scruffy.  It may be injured.  I cannot tell.  Panting and looking straight ahead.  I make my signal and turn right, and leave the wild animal there in the dark.  Then I turn onto Sunset.  

Later I learn that because of the severe drought the coyotes are being drawn closer and closer into the City, looking for water and food.  More are getting hit by cars.  More are eating small dogs and pet cats.

When we get to the bed and breakfast we have rented Finn and his sweetheart Emily are there and they have made dinner for us:  Chicken and humus and flatbread.  It is a sweet homecoming.  

My sister, Mary who has lived in LA more than fifty years has always said that LA is a much nicer place to live than it is to visit and I'm beginning to see how that can be.  Finn and Emily have a wonderful little apartment built in the thirties: walk up to the second floor on black and white old tile floors, a tiny studio, in an old Armenian section of town.  They sometimes take public transportation, sometimes they take these internet "Lifts" I don't quite understand. They walk a lot and they drive.  Their food bill is about a quarter of what Jan and mine is here in Sitka and they eat better food, except for our seafood.  They have an extraordinary coterie of talented friends.  

Finn's first gig we saw was in a converted garage turned bakery in Pasadena.  The audience was largely suburban looking college folks and their families.  Seven comics on the bill.  Two black, Three woman, one other white man,  Finn was the only straight white man on the bill,  which he said he enjoyed because there "are so many straight white men in comedy, my material had a chance to stand out a little bit tonight."  Which, in itself I thought was kind of funny. One of the women was a Christian High School teacher and I thought she had an outstanding set.  

The other gig was in the "Corner Bar" in Burbank which was classic booths and round tables bar with lurid David Lynch red lighting on the stage and hipsters in the audience and three Armenian gangsters sitting at the bar in leather jackets not laughing at a word.  It was wild and hysterical with the last, more seasoned comic of the night hectoring the gangsters until she finally got them to laugh by resorting to direct confrontation and dick jokes.    I learned a tremendous amount about getting people to laugh by watching Finn and his cohorts last weekend.  

Mostly what I learned was diversity isn't something that you can just talk about.  You have to go out and find it.  Finn has found it.  What he wanted when he left Sitka, was the Orange he tasted in his comedy albums, in the TV shows and in the books he read in Sitka.  He wanted to meet these people and he wanted to see it for himself.  Just as Picasso knew when he went to Paris and saw Manet's paintings, and Gauguin's.  

After the late night gig with the Armenian Gangsters we went to an all night Pizzeria on Sunset, near a rock and roll club.  The Pizza was exquisite.  Jan and I had two pieces.  It was one thirty in the morning and way later than we were used to being up but we were all happy from all the laughing we had done.  A guy walked in with a pompadour and a leather jacket, looking to me like a character out of a Tom Waits song, and he nods at Finn, "Hey man."  and he nods back, and a couple of minutes later it happens again with a skinny guy in a thrift store plaid coat.  "Who are these guys?"  I ask Finn, and he says,  "Comics,  I've seen their sets around town." 

Coyotes naturally come in from the dessert.   Tricksters, looking for Oranges I suppose.  It's a beautiful and fragrant town, if you can avoid getting hit by a car.  Our son has found another place where he belongs. I sat up and noticed when he said to the audience,  "I'm from Alaska...originally,"  it was the first time I had heard him say that,  "Originally"...    That's what people from Los Angeles say, and it came naturally to him.  It stabbed my heart a little. 

 

Halloween Party

is over now, your costume

has a hangover.                            

jhs..... Sitka

The Path Of Light

High Clouds in Chatham Straits, calm seas.  On board the State ferry Taku, Jan and my favorite form of transportation.  We have traveled on it so many times the Purser asks me for 500 words of my next book before he will give me a key to a stateroom, and Mary, the bartender will embrace us on the street if she sees us.  If I were an eccentric billionaire I would travel by no other means than horse, ship and train.  I would never leave the surface of the earth.  

I will save my love of terrestrial travel, specifically the Taku for another entry. I’m returning home, the round about way from Fairbanks.  

I volunteer as a board member for the University of Alaska Press and we meet once a year, always in Fairbanks where the press is headquartered.  Fairbanks can give a lot of impressions to a casual visitor.  I first visited there in the eighties in the wintertime working on a case.  In the nineties we lived there for a year when Jan was going to graduate school.  Just dropping in and working cases, I had no ties to the University community or to any real functional community.  I went into my first crack house in Fairbanks: broken pipes, a barely functioning electric heater, no furniture, people laid out on the floor in blankets,  I remember the large burn marks on the rugs.  I had a subpoena to deliver.  I dropped it on a heap of blankets with a person underneath and left.  Ice fog: the frozen exhaust of cars hanging in the lowest parts of town.  I remember a stabbing of a homeless man on 4th Avenue in front of a bar, and how the blood spatter lay like ribbon dry on the sidewalk in the photographs taken in the sub zero cold.  I remember driving my rental and spilling my notes and making the rookie mistake of putting the keys in my mouth before bending down and picking them up and the pain of them sticking to my skin.  

But when we lived there we saw the side of a community life.  We had a toddler and everyone offered help with whatever we needed.  When going to parties if Jan was carrying the baby more than a block in the winter a stranger would stop and ask if she needed a ride.  This is a place where people look out for one another. 

Then there is the extraordinary beauty.  I’m sixty one years old and it keeps knocking me out.  I love southeastern, but I do feel claustrophobic at times: crowded in by mountains, and clouds, rainfall like a curtain pulled in front of the seascape for weeks on end.   Walking out of a building on the ridge of the University of Alaska this weekend I had that sensation akin to that first time I walked through the tunnel in Yankee stadium and out into the field and felt the exhilaration of space… but expanded to the dimensions of the planet.  Great battle cruiser clouds casting shadows on the flat plane of the earth,  meandering rivers,  and a distant horizon that seemed to hold layers of clouds and weather to come.  Then there are the subtleties of birch trees and the black pine, and the rolling hills that appear to welcome you to walk or ski upon their backs, as opposed to our mountains that stand like jagged challenges.   

The Institution of the University in Fairbanks is also remarkable.  Not enough is said about what a gathering of great minds and generous souls are gathered in all the campuses of the UA system.  Sure.  I know.  We can complain.  But when we complain mostly we complain because we want more of it.  We want more and we want it now.   Every time I walk into the University and visit with the people there I learn something, from the other people on the Press board, from the staff. from the friends I know in the community.  There is a wind that blows in popular culture that is afraid of the University community, thinking that it is “elite” and somehow “against the populous” .   This could not be further from the truth…. and I’m saying this as a writer who did not come from a writing program.  The University is a place where “the populous” comes to find and take joy in exploring the deeper complexities of the truth.  And in the case of Fairbanks: take saunas and watch their body hair freeze, river raft in the summer, watch incredible aurora, while gliding along on skis.  discover remarkable painters of birch trees, and poets of the rolling hills,  delve into the actual data of global warming,  witness a rocket launch, and now be a part of remarkable northern press that publishes valuable northern science and literature.  

 

When I arrived in Fairbanks on this trip it was almost one in the morning.  I got a cab ride from a man who had been born in Trinidad.  He was dark skinned black and his accent was lilting and musical.  His cab was a late model pick up truck and I sat in the front seat.  I talked a bit about Sitka and I asked him when he arrived in Fairbanks,  and he said fourteen years ago.  He said he never intended to stay but..  “you know, how it goes,  sometimes things, they just happen that way.”  

“Yes,”  I said,  “I do know,”  and we drove toward the hotel where I would spend two nights.  We drove through the huge black subarctic night, with the thin, pointy trees jabbing up at the stars.  I asked the driver questions just so I could hear his lovely voice as we drove onward chasing the cones of light his headlights threw and I wished we could have driven on, through the snow and the night, straight on to the morning when the top of the world would begin to shine. 

 

One fat Merganser 

flapping hard from wave to wave 

finally finds the air. 

 

                    jhs—-M.V. Taku