Picture Show
15 - 17 August, Ian
Monday was Zoe's birthday and in the late
afternoon we went to see Charlie and
The Chocolate Factory. It's an excellent movie
and there's no need at all to have an accompanying child if you want to head
down to the cinema to see it. Of the four films that we've seen since we
arrived in the US - sampling the local culture - this will be the first that
we'll get on DVD. I'm a big fan of Roald Dahl: his stories for children, his
short stories for the rest of us and, since our friend Martin told me about
them, his two short autobiographical volumes. The film captures the black
humour of the books well and it's done in a contemporary and
cinematic
way. Johnny Depp plays Willy Wonka as Wacko Jacko - his make up, his
androgynous voice, his clothing, his hair, his teeth, his lipstick - to layer
the resonant darkness of Neverland over the complexity of the central character.
The filming is fabulous: Tim Burton uses the screen like many of my favourite
film makers and has the most striking and appealing imagery. This in contrast,
to say, the Harry Potter movies, which theatrically play out scenes from the
books with occasional useful screen trickery (Dobbie, for instance) but no
pervading sense that there's a dimension that's purely
visual.
I'm not sure how interested to be in all of the referentiality to other movies that's in trendy films now but a couple of the allusions in C&TCF speak in my case to the power of cinema. When Mike TV has been teleported and calls "Help me! Help me!" in a tiny voice from inside the TV screen it took me right back to watching The Fly (the original - don't think I ever saw the Jeff Goldblum version) as a child over 30 years ago: it was the same scene. And there was one image of Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands again that was clearly identifiable even though I never even saw the movie.
After the movie we went to an Italian restaurant downtown that, even on a Monday evening, was heaving inside and out. The ambience was great and we had a good time, although the food could only be a treat for those locals who, according to rumour, regularly dine on such fall-out shelter staples of corned beef and pilot bread (I've seen them buying it in the Fred Meyer supermarket but haven't got round to trying it myself). We sat on the patio, which was surprisingly pleasant considering the thick smoke that was hanging over town like a heavy fog. As I've said before, the smell of the smoke when it gets dense even ribbons through our lodge. This is all from forest fires: the area of Alaskan forest that's burned each year is measured in millions of acres; I've done the arithmetic and it really does equate to the cliched unit: an area the size of Wales.
On Tuesday we drove to Denali, which is a huge National Park (the US's third largest - the other two also being in Alaska) situated between Fairbanks and Anchorage. This month the local radio hasn't been up to the consistently high standard of that in Maine but there have been many moments of surprising entertainment. A few days ago, for example, I heard an interview with the guy from Devo - I haven't given a thought to the band in years and it was a real delight to hear him talk about all the TV and advertising work they're getting. On the way to Denali we abandoned the more worthy and sensible Learn Spanish in your Car CD in favour of a local phone-in on the subject of land allotments and hunting. This is a much more subtle political scene than I'd ever imagined - just as the peoples we used to call Eskimos apparently have all of those words for snow, there is a whole taxonomy of types of hunter out here, and associated tensions relating to the use of land. My sympathies were all with the "subsistence hunters": one guy rang in to say that in the 29 years since he'd moved to Alaska he'd never had to buy meat - not because he's turned veggie but because he shoots caribou to fill his freezer. He resented the way that private hunting clubs were developing reserves to draw game off land accessible to the public. It was much more difficult to discern the motivations of the public officials who appeared on the show: they seemed particularly irked that despite its huge size Alaska "harvests" less wildlife than any of the Lower 48, or, indeed, the 50 mile belt around Washington D.C. Moose populations are in decline - although at something over 140,000 of them, there's still a moose for every four Alaskan residents. The problem, if I understand what the officials were implying, is that so little of Alaska benefits from the enrichment that capitalism can provide: 90% of land in Alaska is publicly owned, compared to 3% in Texas, say. Ominously, these same officials all seem to have had some past or current connection to organisations like Safari Club International...
When we arrived at Denali we stretched our legs along one of the short trails close to the Visitors Centre then drove as far inside the Park as you're allowed in your own vehicle, which is, thankfully, not very far. After a night in a little cabin just outside the Park we spent most of yesterday on a tour along the Park's single arterial road in one of the converted school buses that provide the wheels for a variety of services. Although not badged as an "interpreted tour", our driver was a young guy who knew a lot of stuff and shared it with us, stopping whenever asked to look at wildlife. While in my heart I do prefer the eco-hostile freedom of driving my own vehicle wherever I want as we did in the African parks, since there is only one road here and no admissible off-road driving the bus was the thing to do. And there was a very nice camaraderie amongst the people on the bus, which we would have missed in our own vehicle. And beautiful though Denali is, we're in the USA not Africa and for adventure it's never going to compare to Etosha.
We didn't add to our moose count but we did complete the quartet of Alaskan trophy sightings identified by Lonely Planet, with many good caribou, a couple of grizzly bear viewings and a grey wolf. The caribou were all over the place: there are 2,000 of them in the Park (down from 20,000 in 1920) and they're not too shy of the road. Our morning bear was spotted on the far side of a wide braided river and there was a convenient set of benches where we could sit and watch him. Our evening bear was in the same place but a little closer. Given the coincidence of location there was some question of whether the morning bear and the evening bear were the same, but this seemed unlikely - even at a distance of a couple of hundred yards we could see that the latter was a little cub while the former was large. I'm a little disappointed that we didn't have an encounter that required us to bang pots and pans and make our outline seem as large as possible, although this was not a realistic expectation for a bus tour. The wolf was perhaps the most exciting. It stalked right along the side of the bus - as Zoe pointed out after studying her timings, this was only a couple of minutes after we'd seen a caribou walking along the road, loping past our open windows.
There are, they estimate, about 300~350 grizzlies in the Park. They try to count the wolves individually and collar them - this year they've found 66 adults and 24 cubs. There are also black bears but these live in the forest (the grizzlies favour the open tundra) and they're harder to locate.
As well as the headline animals we saw ptarmigan, dall sheep, ground squirrel, a flash of a marmot and an alleged beaver.
And as well as all of the animals we saw Mount McKinley. This is hidden about two days out of every three by cloud. This year and last it has also been hidden by smoke; one of the fires burning in/near the Park yesterday covered an area of around 80,000 acres. Nonetheless, we could see it's huge white snowy form in ghostly faintness looming behind other mountains in the Alaksa range. Here's how my photo shows it:
If I frig around with the settings on my computer I can distort the picture so you can see where Mt McKinley is:
Neither of these photographs is particularly like what we saw, which, mountains aside, had a blue (not grey) sky. I do wonder, when I'm making up photo albums or slides for the web site, how much I should manipulate the images to make them look truer. Generally, I don't do too much, and I feel slightly guilty whenever I do; but the more experience I have of the distortions from the camera's own software the more inclined I am to move a few sliders.
Mount McKinley, by the way, remains the federal but not the State name for the mountain: hereabouts they've recently Ulurued it to Denali.
As I write this I'm very distracted by a logistical problem. This afternoon I had an email from Shaun giving me a link to a company that can do a 24 screen replacement for half the price of Apple. Spookily, within an hour or so of reading the email the damage on my screen spread out considerably from its little region in the corner. But it's now Thursday late afternoon and we're leaving on Wednesday morning for Ecuador. I'm concerned that 24 hours + necessary postal time all the way up here and back will, with the weekend, run me out of time. I have to get it fixed but I may not get my mac back.
I'm not sure how interested to be in all of the referentiality to other movies that's in trendy films now but a couple of the allusions in C&TCF speak in my case to the power of cinema. When Mike TV has been teleported and calls "Help me! Help me!" in a tiny voice from inside the TV screen it took me right back to watching The Fly (the original - don't think I ever saw the Jeff Goldblum version) as a child over 30 years ago: it was the same scene. And there was one image of Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands again that was clearly identifiable even though I never even saw the movie.
After the movie we went to an Italian restaurant downtown that, even on a Monday evening, was heaving inside and out. The ambience was great and we had a good time, although the food could only be a treat for those locals who, according to rumour, regularly dine on such fall-out shelter staples of corned beef and pilot bread (I've seen them buying it in the Fred Meyer supermarket but haven't got round to trying it myself). We sat on the patio, which was surprisingly pleasant considering the thick smoke that was hanging over town like a heavy fog. As I've said before, the smell of the smoke when it gets dense even ribbons through our lodge. This is all from forest fires: the area of Alaskan forest that's burned each year is measured in millions of acres; I've done the arithmetic and it really does equate to the cliched unit: an area the size of Wales.
On Tuesday we drove to Denali, which is a huge National Park (the US's third largest - the other two also being in Alaska) situated between Fairbanks and Anchorage. This month the local radio hasn't been up to the consistently high standard of that in Maine but there have been many moments of surprising entertainment. A few days ago, for example, I heard an interview with the guy from Devo - I haven't given a thought to the band in years and it was a real delight to hear him talk about all the TV and advertising work they're getting. On the way to Denali we abandoned the more worthy and sensible Learn Spanish in your Car CD in favour of a local phone-in on the subject of land allotments and hunting. This is a much more subtle political scene than I'd ever imagined - just as the peoples we used to call Eskimos apparently have all of those words for snow, there is a whole taxonomy of types of hunter out here, and associated tensions relating to the use of land. My sympathies were all with the "subsistence hunters": one guy rang in to say that in the 29 years since he'd moved to Alaska he'd never had to buy meat - not because he's turned veggie but because he shoots caribou to fill his freezer. He resented the way that private hunting clubs were developing reserves to draw game off land accessible to the public. It was much more difficult to discern the motivations of the public officials who appeared on the show: they seemed particularly irked that despite its huge size Alaska "harvests" less wildlife than any of the Lower 48, or, indeed, the 50 mile belt around Washington D.C. Moose populations are in decline - although at something over 140,000 of them, there's still a moose for every four Alaskan residents. The problem, if I understand what the officials were implying, is that so little of Alaska benefits from the enrichment that capitalism can provide: 90% of land in Alaska is publicly owned, compared to 3% in Texas, say. Ominously, these same officials all seem to have had some past or current connection to organisations like Safari Club International...
When we arrived at Denali we stretched our legs along one of the short trails close to the Visitors Centre then drove as far inside the Park as you're allowed in your own vehicle, which is, thankfully, not very far. After a night in a little cabin just outside the Park we spent most of yesterday on a tour along the Park's single arterial road in one of the converted school buses that provide the wheels for a variety of services. Although not badged as an "interpreted tour", our driver was a young guy who knew a lot of stuff and shared it with us, stopping whenever asked to look at wildlife. While in my heart I do prefer the eco-hostile freedom of driving my own vehicle wherever I want as we did in the African parks, since there is only one road here and no admissible off-road driving the bus was the thing to do. And there was a very nice camaraderie amongst the people on the bus, which we would have missed in our own vehicle. And beautiful though Denali is, we're in the USA not Africa and for adventure it's never going to compare to Etosha.
We didn't add to our moose count but we did complete the quartet of Alaskan trophy sightings identified by Lonely Planet, with many good caribou, a couple of grizzly bear viewings and a grey wolf. The caribou were all over the place: there are 2,000 of them in the Park (down from 20,000 in 1920) and they're not too shy of the road. Our morning bear was spotted on the far side of a wide braided river and there was a convenient set of benches where we could sit and watch him. Our evening bear was in the same place but a little closer. Given the coincidence of location there was some question of whether the morning bear and the evening bear were the same, but this seemed unlikely - even at a distance of a couple of hundred yards we could see that the latter was a little cub while the former was large. I'm a little disappointed that we didn't have an encounter that required us to bang pots and pans and make our outline seem as large as possible, although this was not a realistic expectation for a bus tour. The wolf was perhaps the most exciting. It stalked right along the side of the bus - as Zoe pointed out after studying her timings, this was only a couple of minutes after we'd seen a caribou walking along the road, loping past our open windows.
There are, they estimate, about 300~350 grizzlies in the Park. They try to count the wolves individually and collar them - this year they've found 66 adults and 24 cubs. There are also black bears but these live in the forest (the grizzlies favour the open tundra) and they're harder to locate.
As well as the headline animals we saw ptarmigan, dall sheep, ground squirrel, a flash of a marmot and an alleged beaver.
And as well as all of the animals we saw Mount McKinley. This is hidden about two days out of every three by cloud. This year and last it has also been hidden by smoke; one of the fires burning in/near the Park yesterday covered an area of around 80,000 acres. Nonetheless, we could see it's huge white snowy form in ghostly faintness looming behind other mountains in the Alaksa range. Here's how my photo shows it:
If I frig around with the settings on my computer I can distort the picture so you can see where Mt McKinley is:
Neither of these photographs is particularly like what we saw, which, mountains aside, had a blue (not grey) sky. I do wonder, when I'm making up photo albums or slides for the web site, how much I should manipulate the images to make them look truer. Generally, I don't do too much, and I feel slightly guilty whenever I do; but the more experience I have of the distortions from the camera's own software the more inclined I am to move a few sliders.
Mount McKinley, by the way, remains the federal but not the State name for the mountain: hereabouts they've recently Ulurued it to Denali.
As I write this I'm very distracted by a logistical problem. This afternoon I had an email from Shaun giving me a link to a company that can do a 24 screen replacement for half the price of Apple. Spookily, within an hour or so of reading the email the damage on my screen spread out considerably from its little region in the corner. But it's now Thursday late afternoon and we're leaving on Wednesday morning for Ecuador. I'm concerned that 24 hours + necessary postal time all the way up here and back will, with the weekend, run me out of time. I have to get it fixed but I may not get my mac back.
Posted: Fri - August 19, 2005 at 06:55 AM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM