PA Arts Sunday - Part Two - Tuesday Edition - Acceptable Losses Opens in Spokane

The world's most important forensic imagery bronze sculptor opens a retrospective exhibit Wednesday in Spokane, Washington. Acceptable Losses will be shown in the gallery at Spokane Falls Community College from October 21st through November 19th.

Peter Bevis' bronzes, created in situ at oil spills, mass moose killings, wolf carcass piles and other fairly horrific sites, have taken a back seat to other matters for the past fourteen years. In the intervening time, the iconoclastic sculptor got drawn into a decade-long effort to save the old ferry boat Kalakala from its demise at Gibson Cove on Kodiak Island. And other distractions.

Here's an excerpt from an article in Spokane's weekly, the Pacific Northwest Islander, by Leah Sottile, on the exhibit:

Pete Bevis carries around body bags. He needs to be prepared, because he creates art out of dead, exploded, bloody and decomposing corpses.

If they’re hit, dragged and ripped to bits by a car, he calls them road kills. If they’re sucked in and pulverized by a boat propeller, he calls them “prop chops.” And if they got caught in an oil spill, he calls them “spill kills.”

Creating art that is a little bit memorial and a little bit protest, Bevis casts the carcasses of splattered cats, mangled raccoons and car-hacked moose in bronze. In the end, they are alloyed portraits that hang in art galleries.

Through the 1990s Peter Bevis and I collaborated on many art projects, and I helped a bit on the Kalakala project. Collaboration with Peter has led to the creation of six musical works. In 1999, Peter and I brought the tug boat Ruby XIV from Kodiak to Seattle for restoration. The trip resulted in my Piano Concerto.

For the 1993 exhibit at Anchorage's International Gallery of Contemporary Art, Peter asked me to create a long soundscape. As the main feature of the show was the bronzes he had created in Anchorage and Seattle of animals killed in the Exxon Valdez oil spill, I commissioned Alaska poet, Ann Chandonnet, to write an epic poem, called Shadows.

For the first time since the original Anchorage exhibit of Peter's "Spill Kills," the Spokane exhibit will feature Ann's poetry and my music.

Here is Ann's 1993 poem, based on actual statements made by people involved in the Exxon Valdez oil spill and its aftermath, in 1989. I believe this is the first time it has been printed on the web.

If you click on the title of each poem, it will take you to a link where you can play the music, with Ann reciting the poem. Shadows is dedicated to Anchorage environmentalist and oceans activist, Rick Steiner:

Shadows

by Ann Chandonnet

1. Mechanism/Organism

Waves of memory.
Welding things together.
A wake for a wake.
Waves breaking on black rocks
around Bligh Reef.
Breaking.
A thrum of engines.
Breaker, breaker.
Itʼs Valdez back.
Itʼs Valdez back.
No matter where you went it was black.
Slick waves breaking.
A thrum of engines.
Weʼre leaking some.
Going to be here awhile.
Waves breaking black and thick.
Weʼre going to be here awhile.
And if you want to say youʼre notified.
Over.
Russian roulette.
Itʼs not a matter of “if.”
Itʼs a matter of “when.”
Slick waves breaking.
Dark rocks.
Dead on the beaches, all curled up.
Some of those still alive are blind.
Over.
Russian roulette.
Over.
Itʼs not a matter of “if.”
Weʼve fetched up,
And weʼre going to be here awhile.
Sad is too mild a word.
The high costs of being here.
But weʼre going to be here awhile.
Slick rocks,
Waves crashing.
Dark foam, dark rocks, slick.
No matter where you went it was black.
Dead on the beaches, all curled up.
Organism against mechanism.
Sad is too mild a word.
Hundreds of variables.
A thrum of engines.
Awake.
Over.
Awake. Hundreds of variables!
Over.
A wake, a spreading pool.
Over.
Russian roulette.
Over.
Thousands of possible scenarios:
night, engines, ice;
single hull, dark waves, a reef beneath.
The cry of gulls.
Rock against metal,
hands against a flood,
organism against mechanism.
Should be on your radar there.


2. The Places of Animals

caves of watery light
pearly grottoes
hollows
shallows
the flutes of shells
caves
grottoes
hollows
pristine shallows
cathedrals of waving kelp where the sun spreads like honey
fragrant spruce boughs
clean beach sand
gleaming ripples
spawning silvers and kings
caves, hollows
pristine shallows where yellow-legs dart
cohos
cathedrals of kelp where honey ripples
the flutes of shells
slick feathers
sleek fur

surfing seals
Breaker, breaker.
No matter where you went it was black.
The pearls that were their eyes.
Thereʼs a feeling of insult when a bird comes in just sopping with oil.
A feeling of insult.
No question about it.
It was so gross.

No matter where you went it was black.
We cried a lot.
People would come up and say,
“We just canʼt catch any more birds,”
and break out sobbing.
Itʼs beyond imagination.
The pearls that were.
I have wounds all over my hands from loons.
Once, I set a tape cassette on a rock, and the rock began to crawl away.
It was a seabird caked with oil.
A cormorant broke a hole in its breast trying to get clean.
Itʼs beyond imagination.
Slippery, dead.
It was so gross.
We cried a lot.
The red eyes of loons.
We have to deal with birds, so weʼve got these tree huggers taking care of
them.

$89,000 to save one sea otter.
Whatʼs an animalʼs life worth?
The rock began to crawl away.
It was so gross.
A cormorant holed her breast (single hull).
Deer curled up.
The only way we could identify a lot of the birds was by their beaks.
Single hull.
$89,000 to save one otter.
We have to deal with birds, so weʼve got these tree huggers.
No one wants to disturb the goose thatʼs laying the golden egg.
I have wounds all over my hands from loons.
By their beaks you shall know them.
By the wounds.
By the stench.
Washing rocks, one by one.
Whatʼs an animalʼs life worth?



3. Dirge

Sharp beaks of tools.
Wounds all over.
Sad is too mild a word.
Slippery memories.
The limit of our memory wounds us.
Hundreds of variables wound us.

Sharp beaks of tools.
Hammers, the hiss of molten steel.
Itʼs Valdez back.
And weʼre going to be here awhile.

Our memories are short.
Itʼs the limit that frightens me.

This silence,
this feeling of insult.
Hundreds of variables bumping into rocks.
Thousands of scenarios.
Memoryʼs slippery,
So we forget.
Their pattern of behavior is one of denial.

Sad is too mild a word to say for what we are losing.
Hundreds of slippery variables.
Denial.
Forgetting.
Forging ahead.
The limit of our memory.

Sad is too mild.
Stings your eyes.

Hauled out, curled up.

Sharp beaks of tools.
Stings.
Organism against mechanism.
The single hull against the double helix.
Awake?
Shadows of seals surfing.
A cormorant tearing its own breast, wanting to be clean.
Sad is too mild a word.

Waves of memory: welding things together,
breaking them apart.

Holing its breast.
Harbor seals surfing.
Sad is too mild.
The hiss of laden breakers,
the hiss of the viper of energy,
the hiss of the viper of progress,
the dazzle of the welderʼs arc,
the dazzle,
cormorant hissing—holing her own breast.

Sharp insult.
Denial.
Denial.
The limit of our memory.
Sad is too mild.
Stings your eyes.
Hauled out, curled up.
Sharp beaks of tools.
Stings.

Organism against mechanism.
Single hull against double helix.
Awake? Are we awake?
Shadows of seals surfing.


4. Remembrance of Animals

Curled up.
Some otters were blind. They swam around bumping into rocks.
Curled up, dark waves, dark rocks.
Run, hurry!
We need a permit to save otters,
but Fish and Wildlife has put us on hold.
They deny there is an emergency.
Deny.
Brain damage.
The die is cast.
No question about it.
These gorgeous mountains in sunlight,
but there is this silence.
No emergency.
The die is cast.
Run, hurry!
On hold.
Welding things together,
breaking them apart.
Run, hurry! Itʼs bad!
On hold.
No one wants to disturb the goose thatʼs laying the golden egg.
Well, the otters would survive as a species,
so why worry about a few individuals?
Their cries like the cries of human infants.
Curled up, breaker, breaking.
We worked with our hands. This hastened the healing.
You know, otters are a lot like kids.
Some liked squid.
Others wanted shrimp and clams.
Some wouldnʼt eat their haddock.
Itʼs bad.
Scoters and golden-eyes. Curled up.
Why worry about a few individuals?
The ottersʼ plaintive cries,
their tender paws,
mothers cooing to their pups.
Some like squid.
Some wouldnʼt eat their haddock.
Scoters and golden-eyes, ravens.
The rock began to crawl.
No emergency.
350,000 birds.
Got these tree huggers to deal with….But Iʼll keep
them in line.
Brain damage.
No emergency.
And if you want to say youʼre notified.
Over,
350,000 birds.
1,016 sea otters.
An undetermined number of seals and whales.
350,000 birds, including 151 adult bald eagles.
Going to be here awhile?
Itʼs a matter of when—again.
Youʼre notified.
Breaker, breaker.
Over.
Over.
Yeah.
Should be.
Over.

Shadows - © 1993 by Ann Chandonnet; images by Philip Munger

Yes! for the Yes Men

Not very hard to punk FAUX News, eh?


Democracy Now shows a FAUX News anchor getting punked.

America's Second - Uh, Third - Biggest Whiner, Winning Palin Allies at CPAC

America's biggest whiner is Glenn Beck. Second, comes the Crazy Woman. Third in line is mockumentarian, John Ziegler.

This past Saturday, Ziegler confronted a key organizer of the Western Conservative Political Action Conference, David Keane, on lack of support for Sarah Palin. Ziegler, who can sometimes be a bit pushy and irritable, shows below that, with friends like him, Palin may not be able to afford any new enemies (video courtesy of Orange County Films).

Part One:


Part Two:


Part Three:


Here's Ziegler talking about the incident, as it is developing, to a young conservative videographer:


Ziegler talked about this Monday, with Eddie Burke, on Anchorage's KBYR Radio.

Part One:


Part Two:


MSNBC's Keith Olbermann picked up on the import of this Monday, calling it "Wingnut Civil War - as the conservative right starts to eat its own":

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Ziegler just has a way of bringing out the best in people, eh:

For Gryph

Gryph at The Immoral Minority has put up a post about how organizations that have pre-bought the Crazy Woman's fake book are giving it away, or tying "free offers" to subscriptions or to being on HUGE GOP spam lists.

I subscribe to lots of conservative news services, to keep up with what they're up to. Here's a multiple screen shot from just one of them, NewsMax:

New GOP iPhone Apps, uh - Reps...

Obama's Grim Reapers

[President Obama has expanded the role played by private contractors in both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. These companies operate above and beyond our laws, and the Obama administration is quietly opposing ongoing legislative efforts by people like Sen. Al Franken to call these corporate criminals to account. Here is a guest post by Sherwood Ross]

--- by Sherwood Ross

Since taking office, President Obama has sanctioned at least 41 Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) drone strikes in Pakistan that have killed between 326 and 538 people, many of them, critics say, “innocent bystanders, including children,” according to reliable reports. The drone is a remotely controlled, unmanned aircraft.

“Even if a precise account is elusive,” writes Jane Mayer in the October 26^th The New Yorker, “the outlines are clear: the C.I.A. has joined the Pakistani intelligence service in an aggressive campaign to eradicate local and foreign militants, who have taken refuge in some of the most inaccessible parts of the country.”

Based on a study just completed by the non-profit, New America Foundation of Washington, D.C., “the number of drone strikes has risen dramatically since Obama became President,” Mayer reports.

In fact, the first two strikes took place on Jan. 23, the President’s third day in office and the second of these hit the wrong house, that of a pro-government tribal leader that killed his entire family, including three children, one just five years of age.

At any time, the C.I.A. apparently has “multiple drones flying over Pakistan, scouting for targets,” the magazine reports. So many Predators and its more heavily armed companion, the Reaper, are being purchased that defense manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, of Poway, Calif., can hardly make them fast enough. The Air Force is said to possess 200.

Mayer writes, “the embrace of the Predator program has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force.” Today, Mayer writes, “there is no longer any doubt that targeted killing has become official U.S. policy.” And according to Gary Solis, who teaches at Georgetown University’s Law Center, nobody in the government calls it assassination. “Not only would we have expressed abhorrence of such a policy a few years ago; we did,” Solis is quoted as saying.

David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency warfare authority who co-authored a study for the Center for New American Security, of Washington, D.C., has suggested the drone attacks have backfired. As he told The New Yorker, “Every one of these dead non-combatants represents an alienated family, a new revenge feud, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.”

And because of the C.I.A. program’s secrecy, Mayer writes, “there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile, nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war.”

The New Yorker further reports the Obama Administration has also expanded the sphere of authorized drone assaults in Afghanistan. An August Senate Foreign Relations Committee report said the Pentagon’s list of approved terrorist targets held 367 names and included some 50 Afghan drug lords “who are suspected of giving money to help finance the Taliban,” Mayer reports. She quotes the Senate report as stating, “There is no evidence that any significant amount of the drug proceeds goes to Al Qaeda.”

It is the military’s version of the drone assaults that operates in Afghanistan and Iraq, while the C.I.A.’s drones hunt terror suspects in countries where U.S. troops are not based and is “aimed at terror suspects around the world,” Mayer writes. The C.I.A. effort was launched by Obama’s predecessor, and a former aide to President George W. Bush says Obama has left nearly all the key personnel in place.

Running the C.I.A. program is a team of operators that handle Predator flights off runways in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once aloft, the Predators are passed over to controllers at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., who maneuver joysticks and monitor events from a live video feed from the drone’s camera.

The magazine article reports the government plans to commission “hundreds more” of the drones, including “new generations of tiny ‘nano’ drones, which can fly after their prey like a killer bee through an open window.”

(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based writer who formerly worked for the Chicago Daily News and other major dailies. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com)

image - Jason Jeffreys

PA Arts Sunday - Part One - A Beautiful Harpsichord and a Cantankerous Alto Trombone

Friday night, the Anchorage Civic Orchestra gave their fall concert. It was the first concert of that orchestra that has featured a choral work. The masterpiece was Antonio Vivaldi's Gloria. We also performed Rossini's Semiramide Overture and Mendelssohn's 5th Symphony, the Reformation Symphony. Overall, the orchestra did quite well. There was a big audience and they gave the orchestra a standing ovation.

For Vivaldi's Gloria, a harpsichord was needed for the basso continuo. Anchorage musical educator, sometimes composer and cellist, Linda Marsh-Ives had just completed a long-term project harpsichord, so she volunteered the instrument. It played magnificently.

Here are two pictures of it:

I usually play tuba with the orchestra, but there were no tuba parts, and Chris Sweeney, who usually plays first trombone with the orchestra was busy, so I subbed for him. The Mendelssohn symphony requires an alto trombone for the first part. I had only played an alto trombone one time before this concert. I wasn't doing very well in the final two rehearsals. I finally figured out the mouthpiece that came with UAA's alto wasn't right for me. The Horn Doctor in Anchorage fixed me up with a new mouthpiece, and I did, well - I did OK.

Here's the Vincent Bach alto trombone I played (in the foreground) next to my Antoine Courtois tenor:

Garden Cleanup & Food Storage as the Ground Hardens

Friday night it got down to 20 degrees Fahrenheit. I still had carrots and beets in the ground, and a lot of tomatoes in the greenhouse. Fortunately, because of all the sunshine last week, the ground was warm enough that the root vegetables weren't harmed. So a lot of Saturday and Sunday was spent digging, picking, sorting, cleaning and storing the last of our summer's Alaska harvest.

Here are the carrots and beets in a wheelbarrow, after picking:
Here's the garden from the shop roof. The arugula and broccoli haven't yet suffered from the cold. They are fairly hardy:
The carrots and beets (buried) in a tub, after their foliage was removed:

I sorted the carrots by size and type, and packed them in damp sand. They're stored along the windward wall of the shop, and keep well this way until May:
Some twisted carrots I set aside:

On Both Sides of the Coin - Disgusting

Thursday evening, ex-Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, addressed the students at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy. Surprisingly, the engagement was funded by Jordan's King Abdullah. His talk, which might have lasted 25 minutes, was much longer because of almost continuous disruption by students from the University of Chicago and other colleges. Here's a distillation YouTube, provided by The Electronic Intifada:

Let's Hit This One Out of the Park