Eat. Pray. Love. Salt.

I was planning on reminiscing about my last day with the Ocean Salmon Project in Shelter Cove, and how a year ago, I emerged there from a camping trip that would eventually bring about my move to northern Cali. Instead, a 2-mile side-track to Garberville on the way to Shelter Cove revealed a small treasure trove of pictures.

Your typical ice cream toppings.

I looked up the movie “Salt”. It’s about an alleged Russian spy. How appropriate. Angelina Jolie. Julia Roberts. Perhaps I should be able to tell them apart. Or, combining the two movies together, and the leading actresses, and throwing in refined sugar for good measure, would’ve made for a more interesting plot. At least less chicky.

Treats is the ice cream parlor. The only place in town to get a milk shake or ice cream. Or so I’ve been told anyway, by folks in Redway, two miles away. That’s what brought me to Garberville this time. “Treats for everyone”, to quote Kate.

What can I say about the income tax + guns shop? It also houses a visitors center and a pot accessories shop. Thus the formula: pot + guns – taxes = happy tourists.

Come April, you have choice.

]]> http://www.mihaelblikshteyn.com/blog/2010/09/eat-pray-love-salt-garberville-california/feed/ 0 http://www.mihaelblikshteyn.com/blog/2010/01/gold-town-nickelodeon/ http://www.mihaelblikshteyn.com/blog/2010/01/gold-town-nickelodeon/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:48:00 +0000 Mihael Blikshteyn http://www.mihaelblikshteyn.com/blog/?p=113 Just before I left Juneau, Alaska in November of 2009, I was asked to take a few photos of the Gold Town Nickelodeon art movie house for their new website. Here are a couple of the more interesting shots:

One of the most anticipated events in Juneau, Alaska is the annual Wearable Art Extravaganza. A fashion show of extravagant dresses and costumes made from the most ingenious materials, it pushes the envelope of many of the artists’ creative thinking and abilities. Now in its 8th year, the theme for this year’s show was “Altered State”, a twist on Alaska’s 50th anniversary since becoming a state in the union. Due to its popularity as a fundraiser for an arts scholarship program and for the renovations of the Juneau Arts and Culture Center, the show has also been expanded to two days to accommodate everyone wanting to experience it.

This year’s Wearable Art had 33 entrants,  two from as far as Ketchikan and Homer. The idea for the event in Juneau was borrowed from the popular namesake event in Ketchikan and has taken a solid root since. However, the original wearable art was actually started as a fundraiser for a small art gallery in New Zealand and has since become a large international event there, drawing tens of thousands of visitors each year.

But let’s get back to Juneau. The materials used in this year’s show ranged from porcupine quills, moss, bark, and mahogany to mirrors, salvaged metals, phone books, prescription bottles, Skittles wrappers and shower curtains. People of all ages created wearable art and modeled it. Third place on both Saturday and Sunday was awarded to “Goldeneyespy”. Made of brass, fabric, styrofoam, working light bulbs, and many “hidden” objects that could only be noticed upon close inspection – like little toy birds in a cage or a large golden ant – it was truly a creative masterpiece.

“Pieces of Peace” took second place on Saturday and first place on Sunday. Created out of silk, bark chips, porcupine quills, spruce and pine needles, moss and lykens – it was literally a breathing piece of art. The bark for the dress was sent from countries in South America, Africa, Europe and Asia and most pieces had the word “peace” written on them in many different languages.

Finally, the piece that took first place on Saturday and second place on Sunday was made entirely out of solid and striped mahogany, ceder, and lace wood maple veneers. “Lady of the Wood” was created to resemble an 18th Century dress as closely as the all-wood materials allowed. This piece is heading to New Zealand to compete in the International Wearable Art Extravaganza.

Many other pieces were very imaginative and innovative, and it’s only the lack of space that holds me back from describing them. If you’re convinced it’s an event you don’t want to miss, the dates for next year’s show have already been set – February 13 and 14, 2010!

To see highlights of the show, click here.

Luckily, several people outside the cafe directed us around the corner and we soon found two women standing outside, apparently in charge of the commotion. They directed us to a spot on the sidewalk and told us to wait. The bus arrived within 10 minutes and left at 10:30, half an hour ahead of schedule. Usually these buses are full of college students, as they are cheap, fast, reliable and a great way to travel between Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington and NYC. This time, the crowd was different, going to D.C. with one purpose – to witness the inauguration.

We rolled into the D.C. Chinatown at 3 am on January 20th. People were wandering the brightly lit streets, police cars cruising everywhere, their lights throwing patriotic reds and blues on the surrounding buildings. Many cafes and diners were open, filled with people eating, drinking, talking and singing. It felt like an impromptu national holiday, a surreal late-night party in the wee morning hours, when alcohol is gone and everyone is half-asleep.

We decided to take the Metro to the Mall, a large rectangular open area between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument, where most of the people were gathering for the ceremonies. As the Metro didn’t start running for another hour and it was a bit chilly outside, we dove into one of the basement eateries to keep warm. Tea, soup and chicken wings turned out to be the perfect snack for the occasion.

The Metro brought us within half a mile from the Mall. Streams of people were flowing in one direction, combining with streams from side streets into larger flows. Sirens and police lights everywhere blinded and stunned chilled and sleepy walkers. We silently entered the flow and drifted with the crowd. By 6 am we were as close as we could get to the Capitol, yet it was still 5 hours until the inauguration. Not wanting to freeze completely, we walked to the earliest-opening museum, one of the many lining the Mall, and half an hour after it opened were happily napping inside. It would’ve made for a perfect rest stop, if not for the crowd insisting on seeing the exhibits and periodically waking us up with their excitement.

By about 10:30 am, about half an hour before the official part of the ceremony was to begin, we were rested enough to venture outside. By then most of the Mall was full and we couldn’t get nearly as close to the Capitol as we did at 6 in the morning. We found a place on the outskirts of the crowd, by one of the huge-screen TVs. As we came to D.C. to see the people, rather than the official ceremony, I wasn’t paying as much attention to what was going on on the screen as the reaction of the people – booing whenever W. or Cheney would appear on the screen, clapping whenever one of the Clintons would be seen, and the cheer, joy and dancing when the Obamas themselves appeared.

By 1 pm, the official ceremony on the steps of the Capitol was over and the crowd started dissipating. As far as we could tell, the whole perimeter of the Mall was barricaded and closed off and no one seemed to knew exactly how to get out. We would follow the crowd in one direction, to find no escape at the end and turn back, only to come to another fence. What would have been a half-hour walk from the Mall to the Chinatown turned into a 5-hour journey. But it was worth it. To be in a crowd of this magnitude and leanings, it was an inspiring experience.

Here are Suzy’s photos from the trip (link) and a few more of my photos (link).

As I was walking past her mansion on Friday night, I couldn’t help but notice that even the grand entrance is no longer shoveled free of snow.

It’s less than a month until first multi-level cruise ships cast their shadow over downtown Juneau, overpowering with their massiveness most of the waterfront. Their guts will start spewing thousands of tourists onto South Franklin Street, letting them be on dry land just long enough to keep them motivated to spend money in Chinese-made trinket shops along South Franklin or on pre-packaged excursions of a few hours in duration – just long enough to justify the horrendous prices but not long enough to let them appreciate what Juneau is really about.

Just like many other Juneaunites, when I lived in the Valley or out the road, I used to go to downtown once a week or less in the summers. It gets noisy and crowded, tourists walking on roads, as if in Disneyland, cruise ships spewing smoke into the air, which gets trapped between the Juneau and Douglas mountains over the channel. Luckily, I now live just far enough from the waterfront in downtown to be shielded by a 15-minute walk from the passenger docks – just far enough for most tourists not to reach my little neighborhood, tucked away along the channelized Gold Creek.

Let me ramble for another second on the way I differentiate between tourists and travellers.  I greatly enjoy meeting and interacting with travellers – people who plan trips on their own and come on public or mass transportation – be it trains, busses, or, in our case, planes or ferries. They usually don’t rush in, trying to cover a lot of ground over a span of a few days or a week. They take time to learn about places and people. They often come with backpacks and travel guides. They are also often seasoned travellers, who have swallowed the travel bug that now drives them to see and learn still more. Now, tourists, by my definition, are the people who come on pre-packaged tours, often for a week or 10 days. Like animals herds of the Serengeti Plain, they travel in large groups, but instead of migrating by instinct, they are led by travel guides or little brochures to points they must see and trinket shops (often owned by the same cruise ship companies) they must buy from. They, for the most part, end up with shallow, truncated views of places they visit – if being allowed to stay in one place for 6 or 8 hours can really be considered “seeing” it.

When I was in high school, my parents took me on a couple of such “guided” mass trips, and since then I began to despise such travelling. I hope I will feel this way in another twenty years.

However, since moving to downtown and starting to observe tourists incidentally, I became amazed by the plethora of photographic material offered by them. They are brought by floating giants from all over the world and are concentrated on a several-block strip of South Franklin Street. Going there is like going to an human zoo – the tourists offer a gamut of clothing styles, colors, patterns and behaviors. And the gift shops conveniently provide plenty of props to work with – a moving and talking electronic life-size miner with a yellow hard hat sitting on a wooden box, a life-sized plush black bear, an oversized black and white eagle, and a wooden chair in the shape of a bear. And when I walk along South Franklin with a camera with a long telephoto lens, I blend right in – no one even suspects I am there to shoot tourists, not whatever they’re shooting, which I haven’t quite figured out yet. I started working on this captivating project last year and will continue exploring the subject in the coming months.

For more photos of tourists of South Franklin Street, click here. More photos will be added throughout this tourist season!

Mechanical Marvels was the theme of this year’s event, although only a couple of artists took up the challenge. Teresa Busch, winner of previous Wearable Art shows, spent countless hours devising a dress that was to be worn by a model on stage but that was going to drive off stage on its own. “Out of Control” had a hidden radio-controlled car under the dress. The idea was for the hidden car to drive the dress off stage after it was taken off by the model in the middle of the runway. “Metal Fusion” created and modeled by Colena McDougal was another great desgin with large flappable wings made out of aluminum, copper, leather and many other materials.

All together, there were 24 designs by artists from a number of towns in Southeast Alaska, with a number of themes, ideas, materials. Coffee was another, though unofficial, but predominant theme this year with two designs – “Brownies and Coffee” and “Bonnie on the Ritz” – showcasing coffee bags, coffee beans, coffee filters, and coffee-related accoutrements. Two of my personal favorite costumes, designed by Rhoda Walker and modeled by Barbara Kuterbach and Lorraine Langston, were “Mechanical Toys, Past and Future”, consisting of “neck ties, cardboard, female baboon costume with lighted banaba”.

From the caption I wrote for the cover photo of a local newspaper:

The two-day Wearable Art – Mechanical Marvels was a smashing success, with 24 models showcasing a variety of artistic creations this past weekend. Provocative, imaginative, innovative and colorful, everything was to be seen at the event… On both days, first place went to “The Queen of the Sea”, created and modeled by Joanie Waller, with second place going to the “Puzzling Affect”, created and modeled by Temple Schneeberger. Third place was shared by the “Urban Alternative” on Saturday, created by Ricky Tagaban and modeled by Diandrea Mack and Lindsey Forrest and “All Bust Up” on Sunday, created and modeled by Hanna Davis.

More photos:

• See my favorite photos
• View all photos or purchase prints

Father Michael Spainhoward gratefully invited me to his church to photograph the upcoming Holy Theophany on January 18th and 19th. For those of you – like me – who don’t know what it is, here’s an excerpt from wikipedia.org: “from the Greek, theo (God), and phainein (to show forth), theophany means an appearance of a God to man, or a divine disclosure. The Feast of Theophany in the Eastern Orthodox Church on 6 January (which is 19 January in the Gregorian Calendar when the particular church uses the Julian Calendar) celebrates the theophany at the Baptism of Jesus. Eastern Christians commemorate the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan River, his manifestation as the Son of God to the world”.

Not being Christian or religious, I was a bit anxious walking to the church that morning. As I entered the church, I was enveloped by the smells of burning incense and the warmth of candle and tungsten lights mixing in with the bright sun shining through the windows. Everyone there was very welcoming, and put me at ease at once. Ceremonies in Russian orthodox churches are traditionally done standing up, and a couple of benches along the walls  of St. Nicholas were reserved only for older people and young kids. The theophany ceremony was held on the eve of the holiday on the 18th and the following day, on the 19th. On the eve, the priest and the deacon wore golden robes, while the following day, they had red robes for the services. Much of the services were sung by the priest, the deacon and the reader, with some participation by attendants, and sung very beautifully. I was often finding myself too absorbed in the ceremony, standing idly and listening, and forgetting the reason I was there in the first place.

Unfortunately, in terms of my main objective, I was having a hard time seeing and capturing interesting photos, and not for the lack of beautiful colors or visually-rich ceremonies.  Because the space was so small and I didn’t want to disturb my gracious hosts too much, and it was too dark to shoot at anything but the widest lens opening (f/2.8 in my case), I was not getting the depth-of-field I wanted or fast-enough shutter speeds to stop the motion blur. In the end, I was not very pleased with the photos I got. I will continue trying, however, and my future attempts should result in more interesting images.