The Up Side of Snow

It’s great padding, so the baby never gets hurt.

Alaska Girls Finally Get Their Anthem

Maybe you’re stumbling through February starry-eyed as if the only thing to think about is love. Maybe you’re just relieved that it’s above zero for the first time in thirteen days. But it’s not a normal month at all. At least not around our house. It’s February Album Writing Month, and TJ is six songs deep.

The idea of FAWM is to write 14 songs in 28 days. Fawmers write lyrics and music, record their own demos, and then post them to the FAWM site for comments from other fawmers. It’s an online songwriting workshop with 1535 participants.

24 of those folks are from Fairbanks. If you check it out, it might just surprise you which of your co-workers is staying up until 2:30 in the morning every night playing guitar, mandolin, accordion, and kazoo into their laptop.

TJ joined for the first time last year. Now Solstice Complex plays many of those songs out around town. Two of them made an appearance at the Fairbanks Winter Folk Fest last weekend. Click here to check out his progress this time around.

My favorite so far this year is “Fairbanks Girls.” If you’re one of the many folks driving around with an “Alaska Girls Kick Ass” bumper sticker, it’s your anthem. Give it a listen. As one of those Fairbanks Girls, and the mom of two others, I can’t help but feel happy to hear lyrics like this:

Fairbanks girls, don’t need the sun to wake up
Fairbanks girls, knit their own hats
Fairbanks girls, don’t put on any make-up
Fairbanks girls, I like them like that.

tags technorati : FAWM, songwriting, Alaska girls, Alaska, Fairbanks

Review: First Friday at Well Street Gallery

Well Street Art Company , 1304 Well St, Fairbanks, AK 99701 (907) 452-6169

Before kids, we’d go gallery hopping almost every First Friday, regularly hitting both the Well Street Art Company and the Bear Gallery, among others. That changed after the girls were born. Openings are something to breeze into gracefully, which is impossible with a diaper bag, a car seat, and a toddler in tow. But back in October, I heard about The Bone Show, a show at Well Street in which all the artists incorporated bones into their work, and I decided I’d give it a try anyway.

TJ was out of town, so I enlisted Theresa in the plan. The odds were against us. Two moms versus three kids, a crowded room of grown ups, a table of tempting snacks, and a roomful of fragile pieces of art. I packed Coral into the backpack, and we told Cedar and Owen they’d have to hold hands. The show was fantastic. With some bribes of red pepper slices off the hors d’ oeuvres table, we made out OK on the kid front. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to go in the grave installation because the giant backpack baby carrier would have broken through the top, but Cedar loved the whale bone arch.

That night I saw a woman with a newborn in a sling, and I realized that there’s an age limit on taking a baby to an art opening. When they’re still in that newborn, I’m-a-darling-little-accessory-snuggled-onto-your-chest-in-a-hipster-sling phase, they can soak in the ambiance as you take in the art. If you have a four-month-old, by all means, sling that baby and hit the galleries.

The greatest challenge will be the in and out of the car-seat you’ll have to do to get around to different shows. If the little one falls asleep, you could hang out at any one of the galleries for a while. Just standing in one gallery all evening you’re bound to see ten people you know; this is Fairbanks after all.

Galleries, of course, are lacking in changing facilities, but if you time it right (or the baby does), there’s a clean changing table in the bathroom one floor below the Bear Gallery.

Tiny ones may be able to gallery hop, but when they’re big enough to run away, but still too little to have mastered the “no touching” command, it’s best to get a babysitter. So when Ben Huff’s show, “You Can’t See Denali from Here” opened last Friday, we called in the the paid help to watch the kids.

Huff’s photos are great. I have no functional vocabulary to talk about photography, so forgive me, but I can say he captures what Fairbanks is. The photo that sticks in my mind is of a rumpled drawing of the mountains abandoned on the edge of a junk pile (it’s not online, so I can’t link to it here). The juxtaposition of the abandoned mountain and the trash that Fairbanksans rush to Borough assembly meetings to defend defines this place. Our town is so young and hardboiled, so lacking in foresight, so decrepit in its adolescence, so reckless that it’s almost painful. Huff’s photos reveal the beauty in that, or in spite of that.

It was also a nice to finally meet Ben. We met in the blogosphere about a year ago, but hadn’t bumped into each other in reality. Surprising for a town this size.

Get over to Well Street to check out the show (paired with Miho Aoki’s  “Memories and Visions,”drawings and 3D computer generated images–also cool) yourself. It’s up until March 4th.

Subarctic Mama: Blogging for Obama

It’s fifty below today. I’m still feeling hopeful after the caucus, but in this red state, there’s not much I can do. It’s too cold to go door to door and talk to folks. I don’t want to turn myself into a telemarketer, even for a cause I believe in. Unlike Hillary Clinton, I don’t have five million dollars of my own money to throw into the mix. Here’s what I’ve decided to do.

In an effort to make the acquaintance of all the lurkers who’ve been visiting my blog lately (and I’ve noticed there are a whole bunch of you), for every comment on this post, I’ll donate one dollar to Barack Obama’s campaign. It’s easy. You don’t even have to have a blog to join in. Click on comments, say hello, and force me to put my money where my mouth is. I have one rule: people can only comment one time. And one limitation: I’ll donate up to $100.

I wanted to create a “Blogging for Obama” blogroll, but upon speaking with the Federal Election Comission office in Washington D.C., I learned that if the blogroll raised more than $1000 for Obama, it would have to be registered as a Political Action Committee. If it wasn’t, a Federal Elections Complaint could be filed against the person who started it and encouraged others to join. According to them, it is totally legal to make your own personal contribution based on the number of comments you get on a post, but not to organize any other bloggers to do the same thing (without being a PAC). Hmmmmm.

Therefore, I do not encourage any other blogger to donate a dollar to Obama for each comment on a single post, but if you happened to simultaneously get the same idea I did this afternoon, who am I to tell you what to do on your blog? Just don’t start a blogroll.

Join me, readers. Please comment on this post. De-lurk. Tell me what you think. If you love Hillary, tell me why. If you’re a Republican, tell me I’m crazy. If you just can’t stand this cold snap anymore, complain away. Yes you can!

tags technorati : fairbanks, alaska, Obama

News Flash: Subarctic Mama Endorses Obama

Most of my fourteen years as an Alaskan I have been registered Independent. Some years back, when the Greens were in danger of losing their status, I wanted to help out, so I joined them. A few hours ago I changed my registration to Democrat, so I could caucus for Barack Obama.

Despite the forty below weather and the warning about ice fog choking visibility down to zero, so did a lot of other Fairbanksans. At 5:30, when we tried to find a parking spot, both sides of the street were lined with cars and every parking lot in the area was packed. Inside, the line to register to caucus filled most of the J.P. Jones Community Center.

By 6:00, there was almost nowhere to stand. The stuffing of our parkas determined the amount of personal space we got. The pens for filling out voter registration forms ran out, so people shared. The cards on which delegates were to write their district and address ran out, so people improvised, using pages from calendars. The organizers said, “Write your name, address, and district on that and be ready to turn it in.”

Most of us couldn’t get close enough to hear the speeches, so eventually, someone in the big room moved that we separate into districts and get started. At least I think that’s what happened, all I could hear from outside was a loud round of “Ayes.”

People kept remarking, “This is crazy,” and replying, “But it’s a good thing.”

We finally moved into different rooms by district. After we counted out, one at a time, 290 of us in District 7, the fire marshal showed up, and told us to move our cars. They explained that there would be no way to even get an ambulance down the street if they needed one. People yelled, “Vote! Vote!” and “Just get it over with!” “Yes we can!” someone added.

Here are some scenes from the mob:

Here’s the ruckus over the fire code violation and the fan out for Obama:

When it was over, we staggered out of the overheated building into the -40 night and the throat-burning ice fog to try to find our cars. Flashing lights from the emergency vehicles met us.

I worry about this country, where we’ve been going. Tonight, in spite of this nasty cold snap, and the breaking news about the poor choices California Democrats seem to be making, I’m actually feeling a little hopeful.

Here’s where the reporting ends and the editorial begins (look away if you need to):

Maybe even hopeful enough to explain myself to Gloria Steinem and other feminists who are disappointed in my choice. A few weeks ago in the New York Times, Steinem wrote about young women who choose Obama over Clinton:

What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.

I’m bothered that Steinem, one of the women to whom we owe the opportunities we have today, believes our generation of women is in denial, or worse, is just a bunch of escapists.

I’m a feminist. I have a Women’s Studies minor to prove it. My husband and I both changed our names when we got married. I don’t know what other badge I can flash to prove it, but I don’t believe a “Hillary in ‘08″ is the only one I should be allowed to wear. I do not “hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system” in our country. I see what patriarchy has done to our culture. I’m raising daughters after all. Every day I continue the work of dismantling it that previous generations of feminists began.

Nominating Hillary Clinton as a Democratic candidate for president would bring that work to a screeching halt. Not because she’s a woman, but because she is a catalyst for the extreme right. In my political lifetime, I have watched one group grow even more radical than women over 50 and 60—extreme religious fundamentalists and social conservatives.

Clinton will electrify them. She’ll get out the vote for the Evangelicals just as surely as the bogus “Defense of Marriage Acts” they engineered in the last few elections did. The net result will be a loss of women’s rights in the United States.

For a long time now, the right has been in charge of definitions. Liberal is a dirty word. Feminist is an insult. If Clinton runs, we’ll miss an opportunity to reclaim our language. I don’t want to wait until my daughters can vote to start rebuilding this country. I want to start immediately. That’s why I’m voting for Obama.

tags technorati : fairbanks, alaska, Democrats, Obama, Caucus, Super Tuesday

Christo in Fairbanks, Alaska

You might have missed the opening, but Christo and Jeanne-Claude have an installation here in Fairbanks.

Yes, they’ve wrapped the hotel being built in Fanchorage.

Rumor has it that as the artists unfurled huge bolts of plastic, they were overheard saying, “Maybe we should do two layers. It’s really cold here.”

Perhaps, their intention was to point out that box stores are imported prepackaged with no consideration for community or natural surroundings.

Or maybe after all these years they still think it’s cool to wrap shit up. Just look at what they did to these trees.

Yet Another Snowshoe in the Woods Outside Fairbanks

Today it was twenty below. The afternoon light pounded through the living room windows as the ravens started their daily commute from the dumpsters around the valley to their roosts in the hills. I went for a snowshoe in the backyard. In other parts of the world the Superbowl was happening—people screamed, announcers speculated, companies advertised. Silence and frenzy are simultaneous. Just take a look around.

The mysterious black figure in the distance is Woody. He’s waiting for me to catch up.

People have emailed to ask about the new house. Yes, we got it. Yes, we’re moving, but not until the summer. No, Subarctic Mama will not become Subtropic Mama. The new house is just on the other side of town. It’s not far, but I will miss this stretch of snowshoe trail.

If anyone’s looking to buy or rent a 2 bed 1 bath house in the hills on five acres, with a jacuzzi tub, sauna, and guest cabin, drop me a line. Consider that my low-budget nod to the advertising frenzy of the day.

tags technorati : fairbanks, alaska, snowshoe, trail, superbowl, silence