Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1516
Museum of the North, Into the Wild Bus, John Luther Adams installation, visiting my old school, uncle storytelling times, Time Travel in Trek, important Palouse update, walking home under the midnight sun.
Hello all, good afternoon and/or evening. It is just comin up on evening here in Fairbanks. Been a busy day. Sorry I didn’t have time to write this morning. Family was getting antsy from my sleeping in. Needed to go get breakfast and then hit the MUSEUM OF THE NORTH, the museum at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Lovely place. Hadn’t been there in a decade. They are making another big addition to it, the second big addition since it opened when I was about 8 years old. They are adding a planetarium. I hope it is basically all aurora all the time, that would be rad.
They have really upped their art game, too. The art wing is just fantastic now. My god there are so many good modern artists in Interior Alaska these days. Not just a bunch of Machentanz and Ansel Adams. I mean, no shade, but boy. It is so good now.
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I was perusing the donor’s wall and thinking about donating to the museum in the memory of my grandparents, since they seem to be the only people from old Fairbanks related to the tourism industry who have not made a donation. I noticed that the Christopher McCandless Foundation recently made a donation, and it made me wonder why. But then I saw another sign that the museum, with the help of the foundation, recently acquired the actual bus, made famous by Krakauer’s Into the Wild and the ensuing Sean Penn film. They will be making an exhibit around it that they estimate to be open in 2-3 years. Smart move for a museum of the north.
We also drove around town a bit, did some nostalgia touring. We stopped by my old school, Joy Elementary. Emma had noticed recently that it is now a community center, and it is probably open to the public. And it was! We parked, opened the door, walked right in. There was a sign saying activities were closed for Juneteenth (happy Juneteenth by the way) but the doors were still open. We found a woman inside who was super friendly. She, too, had gone to Joy Elementary, about 20 years after me. So it ended up being super informative for both of us, as I could explain to her what the school was like when it was first opened, and she could tell me about what it was like when she went there, and what it is currently being used for as a community center.
She also told me that just this week the Borough (that’s what we have instead of counties up here) voted — by a single vote — to shut the place down. I am very sad about that. It has only been a community center for a couple years. It’s a bummer. Barbara Haney, Tammie Wilson, Brett Rotermund, Liz Reeves-Ramos and Nick LaJiness voted against the funding. So, you know, vote them all out of office, Fairbanks. I am a single-issue Fairbanks voter-recommender.
The place has been remodeled since I went there — the woman we ran into said it was currently in the same condition as when she went there in the oughts, so not recently. But every once in a while I would find something familiar: the 70’s-beige paint still extant on the side of an outlet box. The pie-tin-shaped roof and ceiling still remained in a few classrooms that had not been given drop ceilings. And, most excitingly, one classroom still had the old wooden cubbies and hooks where I put my coat and boots and gloves every day. God. They were just sitting there. Big time nostalgia dopamine hit.
We let Jane play at the playground at Joy, and, reader: there are several pieces of playground equipment there that were the exact same pieces from when I was a kid. They have been moved about 20 yards north to make for the (unsightly, ungainly) addition to Joy, that ruined its perfectly round design. But they were still the same playground pieces. I definitely got a little choked up seeing her on the same monkey bars on which I once played.
We then checked the odometer and drove from the school to the house I lived in when I went there, on Jack St in Aurora Subdivision. Was about 2 miles, which I was allowed to walk as an unaccompanied minor in subzero temperatures in fourth, fifth and sixth grade. Seemed absolutely insane to me now.
Then I bored my family by showing them where my aunt Bonnie lived, and my friends Roy and Raj, and where the Hub was and where that weird-ass warehouse arcade was in the 80’s.
Oh and somewhere along the way we stopped at Creamer’s Nature Preserve and checked out the birds. I think they were Grey Herons.
Yesterday I spend the day up at my sister’s house, where my 83 year-old Uncle told stories to me and three of his neices: we peppered him with questions about Alaska, about our moms, about our grandparents. It was great. He lives in Wisconsin, we do not see him very much. I got to ask him about his time as a SeeBee and the years he spent running the engineering department for the Forest Service. And the history of the forest service, and why it is part of the Department of Agriculture and not the Interior (because its founder was smart and did not want the forests mined for minerals, prescient and relevant to this exact week’s events). It was a great day. I loved every minute of it.
Then I hit up Lemongrass last night for a dance party planning commission meeting and saw Jamie and Dave and Shaulane and Dave and Rochelle and Julia and that was just awesome. I am excited for this reunion dance. It’s gonna be a good time.
Also last night I went to the Botel, a bar within walking distance of my hotel. My grandmother named the bar, was its first manager, back in the 60’s when the riverboat Nenana was parked there and the Boatel was… wait for it… a boat and a hotel. It is alas neither now, so the name makes no sense. My friend Dave was decrying a recent redecoration that took down a bunch of photos of bar patrons, and that is a bummer, because there was a photo of him right above the bar. But on the flipside, the new redecoration included newspaper clippings from the historical era when my grandma ran the place, so that was cool.
Somewhere around midnight, it finally cooled off enough from this Alaskan heat wave and the mosquitoes came out: immediately, forcefully, and in large numbers. We retreated into the bar.
We ran into a few old friends: Meadow from high school, Sean and Jose who were both DJs at KSUA during my era. I wouldn’t have recognized any of them were it not for Dave and Frank, who both still live in Fairbanks part-time, and have seen people more recently than, oh, 20 years. It was great. Classic small town times.
Walked home at 1:15 AM under the midnight sun. It was great.
Our time is slowly running out on this trip, there are tons of people I still want to see, tons of things to do. I could actually easily stay here another week, which is kind of shocking. It is super fun to be here with my family — part of me thinks half the reason I have been historically cranky on my trips to Fairbanks is because I didn’t have my wife with me. It rules having them here. Jane loves it. She watched a 30-minute movie about the Aurora rapt. And another documentary about the Alaska Satellite Facility. Loved it. Love sitting on the overlook by the Butrovich building looking out over the Golden Valley. This is the perfect age to bring her here. I am psyched we did it.
Before I leave you, I would like to comment a bit upon the idea of Time Travel in the Star Trek Universe. Obviously shit got a little out of hand in later serieses with Discovery and Enterprise and the Temporal Wars and all that, but even that, there’s a bit of cleverness in it. When I was a kid in the 70’s I would watch TOS in syndication, and there were a few time travel episodes in TOS. But the thing is, it was easy to get confused about it all. Some “historical” episodes were not time travel episodes, for example, but often, say, a planetary colony trying to depict a certain historical era, or an alien species constructing a reality for humans. And then, of course, Time Travel would happen without Federation technology, such as in The Guardian at the Edge of Forever or whatever it’s called, cut me some slack, I am doing this without Memory Alpha here. But, then, there were actual Original Series episodes where the Federation could time travel: Assignment Earth was one, and I think there was another one where Spock basically had to invent forward-moving time travel. It happened, and the federation could do it, is my point here.
But, you know, syndication in the 80’s. No VCRs, not many re-runs. No internet, no Memory Alpha. So memories got hazy. And you were never sure exactly what the state of time travel tech was for the Federation.
But the movies, well, I watched them in the theater, every single one, and I knew them inside and out.
And the point I am getting to here is, of course, regarding Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. And I very specifically remember the first time I watched it, and the way they handled the conceit of time travel. And I absolutely loved its matter-of-factness. Yeah, we have that tech, it’s not hard, you slingshot around the sun fast enough and bob’s your uncle. Upon later research, I learned that that was exactly the method used in TOS. But in STIV, it was awesome. They just let Bones say “oh yeah it’s easy, slingshot around the sun and away you go but it’s dumb, people don’t do it.”
I loved that. A time travel movie where the point isn’t time travel tech, discovering the tech, grappling with its uses. They had it, they had rules to not abuse it, and everyone followed those rules and they did not kill themselves.
Federation fucking ruled back then, before they ruined it with a bunch of lawbreakers in Discovery and Section whateer-the-fuck. Every person with the resources to have a ship that went Warp 9 could time travel, and no one did it because it was illegal.
Can you fucking imagine Elon Musk being physically capablde of time travel and not doing it and not fucking up the entire universe in the process?
What an absolutely subtle, radical vision of utopia.
OH and final topic: turns out I have a friend who lived in Palouse, except it’s not Palouse, well, there is Palouse the town, but the whole region is called The Palouse and it is probably the region that sponsored the airport. Best part: she sent me some screenshots of the comments from when they announced this inexplicable play area brand activation.
The photo you see above is from the Museum of the North’s installation The Place Where you Go to Listen, which is a generative music piece composed by famed classical composor John Luther Adams, the very one made doubly-famous by Taylor Swift. The piece uses astronomical data about the Aurora Borealis, weather, and sun data for Fairbanks and makes music out of it. It will, therefore, be different every time you visit. Though it does not change much on any given day. It is awsome. God bless whatever rich Alaskan funded this piece. Adams, who has won a Pulitzer and a Grammy, lived in Fairbanks for a good while of my childhood, and I remember him from when he played Tympani in the local symphony.
Thusly, your media of the day is a clip from this piece. THere are a bunch of these on Youtube and in a funny way, it’s kind of the best way to listen to the piece, since all of the clips uploaded to Youtube are noticeably different:
It is with great disappointment I report to you that the Museum of the North did not have any John Luther Adams merch. I did see a guy in a Wussy shirt, though, and we bonded over their recent reunion at Mercury Lounge, that we both wished we could have gone to.
OKAY. BYE. TALK TOMORROW.
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Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.