Anchorage Press

The first winter

Trail making is part construction, part art. How else can you combine aesthetics and usability with durable, low-maintenance trails that are wide and stable enough for year-round use, despite the annual inundation of spring thaw?

Cabin fever

I’m a great one for doing things at the last minute, or without any prior planning at all, especially when it comes to outdoor recreation. Many of my solo outings begin with me piling any potentially useful gear into the car—tarp, sleeping bag, snowshoes, skis, rain gear, and so on, depending on the season—then setting off in a general direction until I get... somewhere.

The dog watchers

My memories of Iditarods past have me standing behind a temporary fence of bright orange plastic mesh, alongside the multiuse trails that weave through town. Dogs, sleds, mushers and riders streamed by, revved up from the downtown start, whipping out of sight around the next turn in the trail like a long string of furry bobsled racers.

Where's the 'Wild Life'?

At first glance, the idea behind the recent Transit 2 Trails event at Goose Lake seemed ridiculous. Take the bus to access a trail network that already spreads through town like a spider web anyway—something I could just as easily do by walking to the nearest trail, then using the trails themselves to get to the lake instead of a bus.

Royals and jesters

Decisions, decisions

War and peace

“You don’t need a husband; you need a Greek chorus!” Count Leo Tolstoy (the peerless Christopher Plummer) bellows at his wife Sofya following yet another one of her dramatic tantrums. As portrayed by Helen Mirren in Michael Hoffman’s decent period drama The Last Station, the histrionic countess emotes with enough mad theatricality to entertain a packed amphitheater instead of just enraging an audience of one in her own home. Sofya purrs, shouts, wails, intimidates, and even smashes the china, but there’s enough of a wise glint in her wild eyes to suggest that she knows exactly what she’s doing. It’s those same occasional flashes of lucidity that narrowly prevent you from dismissing Mirren’s performance as indulgent overacting. Also, the fact that it’s Helen freaking Mirren should be another clue that she’s got this manipulative diva’s number.

Chaos reigns

25 years into his career, it’s likely that you, as a sophisticated (and attractive!) moviegoer, have already formed a strong opinion about Danish auteur Lars von Trier. 1996’s transcendent Breaking the Waves cemented von Trier’s place on the international cinema stage, and for the last decade or so he has done nothing to endear himself to any of us. Von Trier’s films routinely teeter on that thin, maddening line that separates challenging from indulgent, and it’s very apparent that he makes them for one person and one person only. (Hint: This person’s name rhymes with Bars bon Brier.) Comparatively speaking, von Trier’s most recent previous film, a clever workplace comedy called The Boss Of It All, was a bit of a lark, especially in light of his latest, the brutal and eye-popping Antichrist.

Arrested development

Ethnomusicology and Hitchhiker's Guide

Local metal to go

While there are many other similarly-sized cities that boast more robust local music scenes, the activity in Anchorage's own small, bustling network of bands would probably surprise most Outsiders. That network stretches across layers of variable styles and tastes, but the local metal scene is the one that has proven perhaps the most fertile. There are, at the very least, a large number of heavy and loud bands here. Decepticide is one of them.

Being Django

John Jorgenson’s parents had a rule when he was young: You must practice your piano and clarinet before you can practice guitar.

Bluegrass foundations

Raised in Wayland, Massachusetts, Rowan grew up surrounded by his own family’s musical roots. As a teenager, he immersed himself in the rising folk and blues scene of Boston where musicians such as Joan Baez, Muddy Waters and Sonny Terry frequently graced the stages. Rowan’s own musical career began playing for Bill Monroe’s The Bluegrass Boys based out of Nashville. For two and a half years, the band toured the United States and abroad. While routinely playing the Grand Ol’ Opry with Monroe, Rowan was attracted to the darker edge of his mentor's style of bluegrass—it maintained the balladry of traditional bluegrass yet incorporated more blues into the mix.

Karl Denson's funked-out universe

Battle-core

Metal can be a lot of things: Powerful, dynamic and technical; spiteful, angry and aggressive, or melodic and epic. And yes, it can sometimes be cheesy—very, very cheesy. Dragons, demons, devils and wizards are no strangers to metal, and some embrace this fantasy world with complete and nerdy enthusiasm. Plenty of others also embrace the fantasy, but in the spirit of irony, not nerdery. That makes it hard to tell just where Vancouver's 3 Inches of Blood are coming from.

Mean, smart and sensitive

Everybody has at least one friend who says stuff she probably shouldn’t. When she’s smart enough to let people in on the joke, it’s funny, even charming. When she pushes the line separating judgmental from judgmental and mean, her audience narrows, and those of us still laughing know we’re either being mean, too, or taking part in some bizarre ironic catharsis.

For Those About to Rock

From the beginning, rock bands with loud guitars were a predominantly masculine enterprise. With rock 'n’ roll quickly approaching senior citizenship, we've unfortunately not done a great deal to level the guitar playing field (or drum or bass ones either, for that matter). Sure, there's an innumerable number of women playing in rock 'n’ roll bands nowadays, but their participation usually garners extra attention, with reviews and stories usually littered with phrases like “female-fronted band” or “all girl band” instead of just, you know, “band.”

Less jam, more band

The Emmitt-Nershi Band might sound like a jam-band dream team. After all, it’s fronted by Drew Emmitt of Leftover Salmon and Bill Nershi of String Cheese Incident, two hard-touring hippie rock bands that rely on country and bluegrass canons for inspiration, ornamentation and—let’s face it—gimmicks to make barroom rock sound more interesting. (It worked for the Dead, so why not?) But ENB is a bluegrass band, and if the songs on the band’s album New Country Blues are any indication, this project is more focused, defined and just plain better than the hippie overdrive bands it sprang from.

Experience Randy Hansen

In Like a Rolling Stone, author Steven Kurutz details the lives of a couple competing Rolling Stones tribute bands, and, in doing so, finds himself exploring the nature of tribute bands in general. He traces the phenomenon to late '70s Beatlemania, specifically the Broadway musical Beatlemania. Since then the enterprise has exploded.

Cleaning up with Flowmotion

The good, the bad, and the breathtaking

Fill ‘er up

We all wait in line when we want something bad enough. We wait in the cold, in the snow, in a maze of bodies, even in the depths of night, for everything from Black Friday deals and concert tickets to bus rides and 20 seconds on the hovercraft at the Star Wars exhibit.

Art you wear

Sunlight brings out the beauty of fiber, whether in the furs and pelts we collect or the things we wear.

Drawing by seeing

As students gathered their pencils, pens, graphite and pads at the Anchorage Museum last Thursday evening, conversation turned to the ambient temperature. The classroom felt cooler than usual. Soon, a space heater turned up, not for the students, but for the model.

Project I-bet-you-wouldn’t-have-thought-of-this

This show’s name, Object/Runway, takes something familiar—the TV show Project Runway’s name—and reinvents it. In doing so, that name gives viewers an indication of they can expect. Reinvention, or reclamation, is one of Object/Runway’s main themes. That and being wearable are the themes that ties together this show’s installments.

Warning: This art is not Alaska-themed

Artists Roman Rubio and Morgan Rauscher are both familiar with the human form and the usage of bright, vibrant color when depicting it. That much is obvious at first blush. But a closer look shows that these two artists share more than just bright colors and subject matter. Both artists have work that fits into more realistic, concrete categories and work that is abstract, and, when they go abstract, both artists have cubist leanings: Hands are painted larger and darker than heads, and torsos are attached to heads and arms that seem out of place. The result is a series of strange, bright depictions that draw the viewer in and raise questions.

Flagged

First think of a flag this way: a piece of cloth with a design on it. As textile, a flag doesn’t sound so controversial.

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