I was at a reception for the visiting delegates to the Conference of Young Alaskans on Monday. It was hosted at the Juneau Douglas City Museum and while I was searching for the stuffed mushroom platter I stumbled across Mark Daughhetee’s brilliant “Reconstruction” exhibit.

When I walked into the room I overheard a girl say “I’ve seen that somewhere before.. I just can’t place it.”

It’s exactly that feeling of deja-vu which breathes life into this clever collection of photos.

In the exhibit, Daughhetee recreates some of the most recognizable images of our time and questions why a particular photograph rises above millions of others to stand as an icon. He takes the moments out of their context, he changes the visual elements, and he reshapes the images in a way that playfully distort our vision by playing off memory.

Following are images and some of Daughhetee’s commentary from the “Reconstructions” collection. If you click on an image you can see a larger version in comparison with the original source.

Migrant Model
In 1932 Dorothea Lange was a photographer working for the Farm Security Administration. She was documenting the plight of migrant farm workers in California when she came upon her now famous subject, Florence, a 32 year old mother of seven, living in a lean-to tent in Nipomo, California. Lange made five exposures of Florence and her children using her 4×5 Graflex camera. According to Florence’s grandson, Lange had promised that her picture would not be published, but would be used by the government to help the struggling farm workers. And though the promise was broken, Lange’s image became a symbol for the Dust Bowl era and was instrumental in drawing attention to the needs of the people in the camps.

Insulating Foam
Associated Press photographer Bruce Weaver was one of many who documented the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. To reconstruct his image I sprayed expanding insulating foam onto sheets of waxed paper from a pressure filled can. Eventually I was able to get a reasonable facsimile of the shape of the explosion captured in the widely published Weaver photograph. The foam was allowed to set, removed from the waxed paper, affixed to a painted board and photographed.

Hosed
Hosed is based on the Eddie Adams Pulitzer Prize winning photograph depicting the 1968 execution of a Vietcong prisoner on the streets of Saigon. The Adams photograph was so powerful that it was credited with having a galvanizing effect on turning the tide of opposition to the war in Vietnam. The unidentified prisoner, who had just murdered eight South Vietnamese citizens, was shot by General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, director of South Vietnam’s police force. For the rest of his life, Loan was haunted by the execution. He relocated to the United States after the fall of Saigon where he ran a pizzeria near Dale City, Virginia until 1991. His identity was eventually discovered and shortly thereafter his business failed. He died of cancer in 1998.

911
An indelible image, yet it is the only photograph in this exhibition that is not based on a single image. Instead, it was created from a compellation of many images that we saw that day and in the days that followed. The model; built from cardboard, plastic, foam rubber and steel wool, was constructed within a week of September 11, photographed and destroyed. The print was finished and put away from view. Many months world pass before I began the second image of this series.

The exhibit at the City Museum is closed but you can still catch it at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage in September or visit Daughhetee.com to see these and other photos.

So I got this thing in the mail from an organization called “Friends of Hillary” and naturally I thought, “Hey, Hillary Duff finally wants to extend her friendship to me. It’s about time.”

But I was wrong. Actually it was a “survey” from a lady I have written way less love notes to, Hillary Clinton. I put “survey” in quotes because it contained questions like this one:

How concerned are you that the massive budget deficits caused by Republican economic and tax policies will inevitably result in drastic cuts in Social Security, Medicare, education, and social services?

I’m not a lawyer like my new friend Hillary, but I think that’s what they refer to as a leading question. I worry that this letter she sent me falls less into the category of survey, and more into the category of partisan political propoganda. And I don’t think it falls into the category of love note at all.

I think I’ll write Hillary Duff again and see what she thinks.

My dad used to own the Perseverance Theatre building and we lived upstairs above the neighboring Billiken Bar. I remember at age three just having the vague impression that it was somewhere special. When anyone talked about art, theatre, or public television I assumed it all took place there. They once did a Sherlock Holmes play and since it was all the same to me I assumed that Sherlock Hemlock from Sesame Street was my neighbor and they were filming his portions of the show downstairs.

One of my favorite stories from that time is of Billy Horner, another tennant who lived above the theatre. Perseverance was doing The Diary of Ann Frank and night after night he had to listen to the Nazi’s stomping about as he was trying to sleep. One night he got fed up and went downstairs with his shotgun to save Ann.

I went to the theatre Saturday night to see columbinus and the space still feels the same to me even through the first slow steps of rennovation and expansion.

Columbinus was directed by PJ Paparelli who co-wrote the play with members of his theatre collective, The United States Theatre Project, and brings it to Juneau as part of a co-production world premiere. Paparelli, also the new artistic director for Perseverance, researched this play extensively and often quotes directly from a journal, tapes and other artifacts left behind by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. It’s not my favorite play of the season but it had me thinking about the events after I left the theatre and ranks highly as a social examination. The play opening comes at a time when our own Juneau Douglas High School is being scoured for weapons and under watch after finding a message written on the wall of the women’s restroom that claimed the writer would bring a gun to school Thursday.

High School is a strange little social Petri dish… Theatre too.

The Folk Festival is one of the best things Juneau has going for it. It ranks right up there with the third and fourth of July. We’re not quite ready to sing Good Night Irene but the weekend romances and drum circles are breaking up and tender dancing feet are being looked after.

Work got in the way plenty but I managed to have a fun week anyway. Friday I ran into the banjo plucking woman from the Ferry and I asked her what she does when she isn’t plucking a Banjo. She paused for a while and smiled. That is what she does. She’s a musician. What an appropriate occupation. I bought one of her CD’s because I wanted to say thank you for the live music while leaving the Skagway ferry terminal. I got around to giving it a listen today, the introduction caught me a little off guard with the conversational lyrics and wandering themes but once I figured out what was going on I had to go back and listen again. It was a perfect introduction to this meandering walk through a town with more memories left than life. The CD “Lucky Burden” is full of songs inspired by Keno City and paints a picture of rusty trucks, sagging buildings, and crisp morning air. (more…)

Lou and I attended the KitschyYumYum Burlesque Show last weekend, an event skillfully organized by John Leo and Melissa Davis.

I think seeing your friends and neighbors half naked on stage really shatters the barriers that we put up in our day to day interactions. It adds a touch of humanity that too often gets distilled.

We were told to dress in drag but we figured everyone else would be in drag so we bought some fake fur and made caveman outfits. I haven’t really done much sewing since middle school home economics class so I relied heavily on staples. Maybe if someone could invent a machine that would do the sewing for you it wouldn’t be so bad.. yes… some kind of.. sewing machine. I think I’m on to something here but until I can figure out how to construct such a device I’ll have to rely on my trusty Swingline.

I liked that the line between the stage and the audience was blurred. You couldn’t really tell who was supposed to be in the show and who was just acting up. Sometimes the most interesting things were happening right in the middle of the audience.

On Friday I went to see “The Long Season” at Perseverance Theatre and the more I reflect on it the more I like it. The play, under the direction of Peter DuBois, was written by Chay Yew with music by Fabian Obispo.

The story is really what shined for me, I thought it was well guided and explored a good breadth of themes without becoming stretched too thin. Paolo Montalban let hope and innocence shine through in Allos and his charisma really made the character likeable. Melody Butiu played as Belen, a character who had lonely crumpled dreams and the demeanor of a forty year old woman you might find somewhere in the haze at the back end of a dive bar. The really great bits of acting were done by Bernardo Bernardo who is apparently the Filipino version of George Carlin. He played a more serious role here as a man bent and changed by love, time, and dreams of a better life.

The thing I really liked about this play is that Perseverance chose to explore a bit of the Filipino history here in Southeast Alaska. They do a great job of sharing Alaskan Native culture and it’s nice to see them recognize the importance of the Filipinos to the development of our community as well.

Story… check. Acting… check. Music… uhmmm. yeah.

Unfortunately this was a musical that didn’t really need to be a musical. The songs lacked identity and didn’t do much for the story but make it run longer than it needed to. I suppose it offered a chance for the characters to think aloud but it wasn’t anything that couldn’t have been explored with staging or dialogue. It felt more to me like one of those unneeded layers of creative glaze that gets put on just to be sure it has some critical acclaim or artsy stature and I don’t know that any of the songs would stand alone.

It could be I’m just grumpy because they didn’t have cookies at intermission. Who eats biscotti? It’s like gnawing a dog biscuits.. trust me I know.

The play is worth seeing but twenty-two dollars can also buy a good book and a whole bunch of cookies.

I hate magazines. They only exist to hack and spew inserts into my lap. I don’t know why I thought I should subscribe to a new one, it was probably due to my American consumer brainwashing. Thank god for that because I got the first issue of Make Magazine yesterday and it kicks ass. A hefty 181 pages of do-it-yourself projects published quarterly by O’Reilly and edited by Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing. I can’t tell you how amazingly cool this magazine is.. yet.. I must… try.

This magazine makes me feel like I’m a wide eyed, buzz cut kid from the fifties who has nothing to worry about but Sputnik. It’s all the goodness of erector sets, model rockets, and those little electronics kits that you could build radios out of but you only used to shock your sister. The first issue has iPod hacks, plans for a $14 camera stabilizer, a magnetic stripe reader and how to make a Desktop Gauss Rifle.

“A linear accelerator for studying high-energy physics costs around $5 billion. But you can make one for about 30 bucks with four strong magnets, a wooden ruler, some plastic tape, and nine steel balls.”

So go order a copy of Make and rent October Sky while you’re waiting.