"I Hope Nobody Was Disenfranchised" - Anchorage Mayor Dan Sullivan

Pete's Pantheon: Jay Hammond, The Oracle of Lake Clark

 

Before the Republican party became the last refuge for opportunists, fools, knaves and scoundrels, there were some GOP giants whom you could proudly vote for. Leading that list was the rugged and charismatic Jay Hammond.  Wally Hickel came up with a jingle called "Alaska Man" to get himself elected in his last race for the office of Governor.  Jay didn't need a jingle like that because everybody already knew he was a Bush-pilotin', wood splittin', homesteadin', WWII Marine.

Hammond was narrowly elected in his second run for Governor, squeaking by Wally in the primary with the thinnest of margins. He and his running mate, Lowell Thomas Jr, had the temerity to run without disavowing conservationism. This hurt them seriously, especially in the Alaska GOP of the time. No GOP candidate would consider this in Alaska today, and, now that I think of it, it would make him a fringe candidate as a Democrat.

He will be remembered in the long run mainly for the Alaska Permanent Fund. When I worked at the Anchorage Daily News, it was a constant source of wonder and amazement to  see how many politicians came in and took credit for the fund. But if you could run a test on it, you'd find mostly the Bush-pilotin', wood splittin', homesteadin', WWII Marine DNA of Jay Hammond.

Even after leaving office, Hammond stayed involved with statewide issues such as the future of the Permanent Fund and the solution to the subsistence hunting impasse. He regularly wrote for the Anchorage Daily News from the Olympian reaches of his remote homestead. He was so constantly courted and cited by Alaska politicians that an irritated Tony Knowles referred to him as "The Oracle of Lake Clark".

I ran into him at a friend's house shortly before he died. He recited poetry, talked politics and told me my cartoons were making a difference. Who was I to argue? The oracle had spoken.

Pete's Pantheon: Thorstein Veblen, Wry Hedgehog

Isaiah Berlin, the British diplomat and philosopher, is celebrated for separating thinkers into two groups. The first group is foxes, the second, hedgehogs. Foxes know many things; hedgehogs know one big thing. If ever anyone fit the hedgehog category, it was Norwegian-American economist and anthropologist Thorstein Veblen.

Veblen's big idea was propounded in a small, wry book first published in 1899, "The Theory of the Leisure Class". His notion was that the actions of humans across the world are driven primarily by an urge to display their superiority by demonstrating their economic clout through the showing off of  wealth. The more wasteful and frivolous an activity, the more it shows how much you can afford to throw away. He called this "Conspicuous Consumption". He goes on to explain darn near anything anyone does in terms of his great idea, and makes quite a case.

Why do suburbanites own SUVs to drive to the grocery store? They are expensive gas hogs, and thus confer status. Why do we buy McMansions with three car garages, jacuzzis and opulent kitchens, and payments that slowly crush us? Veblen knows. Your boat, your vacation, your membership in the gym? It's all about the bling, baby.

Veblen finds replications of this behavior across time and culture. It crosses lines of class and race.  If Veblen were alive today, he would not find us difficult to recognize or understand. Foxes or Hedgehogs, we're all too human.

Pete's Pantheon: John Sayles, Empathy's Witness

Like a string that vibrates in sympathy with other strings, John Sayles creates art from his deep ability to resonate with the emotion, thoughts and speech of others. His stories are testaments of faith in the decency of the individual, out of sync with the vulgarity and cynicism prevalent in popular culture. A frequent theme is the human capacity to choose what is right, and to act for the common good in spite of a world that, to paraphrase Werner Herzog, sets each against the other and God against all.

Sayles has managed to follow his muse, subsidizing his own films by working as a Hollywood script doctor. Yes, the man who wrote and directed "Matewan" was the guy who breathed life into "Pirhana 3-D". He has succeeded for decades outside the Hollywood system, making the movies he wants to make. That alone would certify him as worthy of the MacArthur "Genius" grant which Sayles won in 1983.

The Sayles point of view is captured in his short story "The Halfway Diner" He employs dramatic irony brilliantly to create suspense as we wonder how a busload of women on their monthly trip to visit their men in prison will be affected by events that occur at the prison as they make their journey. The women come to life for the reader as they forge fragile alliances and share common burdens. Thanks to Sayles' ear for the way people talk and his ability to conjure flesh and blood from ink on paper, the reader takes that bus trip along with the other passengers.

The "The Halfway Diner" was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1998, When Sayles gave a reading of the story in Anchorage, he recounted how when he got the galleys, the editors had changed his punctuation throughout the piece. He threatened to withdraw it, and the editors put it back the way he originally submitted it and published it. When the National Magazine awards rolled around the Atlantic submitted the story and won a prize- for editing. A nifty little John Sayles story in itself.

Pete's Pantheon: Professor Longhair, Polyrhythmically Perverse

Henry Roeland Byrd is a fine name. But if you want to be the Zulu King of New Orleans piano players, you need a name with a little more je ne sais quois to compete with the likes of Jellyroll and Fats. Somewhere, Henry came up with the name  Professor Longhair. It captures his brainy and wild approach to music neatly.

'Fess, in fact, seems to have had two brains. One for his left hand to boogie and chug with, and the other for his right hand to spin glorious arabesques of melody that loop and skitter, contrasting and converging with the bass lines with a dexterity and invention that satisfies and delights. His buoyant Rhumba/Jazz/Blues music combines logic and surprise in a way that reminds more than one listener of Bach.

The wildness in his music, accentuated by the weird yelps and yodels of his singing style, seems to have limited his appeal outside of New Orleans. But he is the hometown hero that players like Dr. John and Allen Toussaint look up to.  A long way up.

Pete's Pantheon: Tom Waits, American Orpheus

Tom Waits has always had more imagination than he knew what to do with. In the seventies he imagined a drunken beat poet alternate reality to the tough-but-sensitive singer songwriter milieu of his Southern California surroundings. Even so he beat them at their own game with songs like "Old 55" and "San Diego Serenade". It was music that most of his contemporaries would have traded their souls to the Devil for, if only he wanted them. Songs Waits today repudiates.

In the early eighties Waits was getting bored with the romantic drunk shtick and was looking for a way forward. Every album had contained great songs, vivid characters and imagery, but the context was becoming repetitive and confining. Nietzsche's Hell was eternal recurrence, and Waits had been there long enough. 

Then he met his collaborator and wife-to-be Kathleen Brennan. Brennan challenged him to head out cross-country. Waits and Brennan began to write songs that incorporated everything from American folk song, Country, and Blues, to the European art song of Kurt Weill, to the sound of circus bands. The glass harp, the musical saw and strange percussion instruments devised  and played by Waits made their way onto albums that, starting with Swordfishtrombones, Waits produced himself.

Much of what follows is nightmare, as Waits and notable collaborators like percussionist Michael Blair and guitarist Mark Ribot clang and thrash with a menace that echo the desperation of Waits famous rasp of a voice. This would get old in the hands of a musician with less empthy, (Beefheart, anyone?) but Waits is willing to remind us of why it matters. The horror of "In the Colosseum" is countered by the hope of love, bent, but unbroken in "Downtown Train".

Both strains come together in his great anti-war song "The Day After Tomorrow" It's not an anthem,  it's a quiet letter from someone who has seen too much too soon.  Waits makes  the character real with lines like "What I miss you won't believe, shoveling snow and raking leaves". The writer still clings to life in spite of what he's done "We just do what we are told, we're just the gravel on the road", and what service in the war has cost. "And I know we too are made of all the things that we have lost, dear." he sings, and... ahh, but what are you doing listening to me? Go listen to Tom.

Pete's Pantheon: Martin Carthy, Discovering the Funk Deep in the Soul of British Folk Music.

If Martin Carthy's music never existed, I'm convinced that I would be haunted by a feeling that the world was missing something. His playing seems like a fundamental part of the Universe, like gravity.

Who is Martin Carthy? Only the guy who taught Paul Simon to play "Scarborough Fair".  The guy whom Bob Dylan tapped for his knowledge of British Ballads. The guy from whom Johnny Marr said he cribbed guitar lines,  merely speeding them up. Michael Hedges and Pierre Bensusan have praised him and worked elements of his playing into their approaches.

Carthy has an uncanny ability to carve away everything inessential from a song. His sense of time is exquisite. He plays the silences as well as the notes. His brilliant and bold use of dissonance and modal scales, combined with his unique percussive guitar transfixed me since I first heard him in the late 1970's. Somehow Carthy discovered the funk deep in the soul of British Folk Music.

He applies the same ruthless genius to his accompaniments for other musicians, creating lines that interact and enhance others melodies with subtle invention. He builds in tension and releases it at the last instant, infusing drama where so many others can't even imagine it.

In addition to his playing and singing, he has been a collector and restorer of damaged or fragmented songs. With the fine eye of a diamond carver, he will fit a husk of an old song with a new tune, add carefully chosen words, and bring it alive, widening the repertoire.

I've learned over time that some people just don't get Martin Carthy and are happy to do without his music. I could do that. Right before I give up breathing.

Pete's Pantheon: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, God's Gift to Rock and Roll

Midway through the French movie "Amelie",  archival footage rolls across the screen of a gospel performer who is tearing the roof off the studio.  She and a choir have perfected what is, if not the first sound of Rock and Roll, at least one of its earliest incarnations. Then the woman digs her thumbpick into the strings of her white Gibson SG and plays leads that smoke off the fretboard while she moves like Pete Townshend in full manic fury. Who the Hell was that? Who else but Sister Rosetta Tharpe?

Rock and Roll, like the Blues, gets most interesting when the sacred smacks up against the profane. Sister Rosetta (1915-1973) was playing Gospel music on stage from the time she was four. By the time she was a young woman she, unlike most other Gospel performers, was as happy to play the Cotton Club as a church down the street. The money was better, and besides, she might reach a sinner there who wouldn't show at church.

She was well-known in her heyday, played with Benny Goodman, toured Europe, and was featured in the first of John Hammond's famous "Spirituals to Swing" concerts. Johnny Cash said she was his favorite singer. Mention her today and be prepared for blank stares. But turn on your radio, and she is there whether you know it or not. She took the Church into the barrooms with full revival joy and intensity. You can call it what you want, it sure sounds like Rock and Roll to me.
(Hat tip to Wikipedia)

Pete's Pantheon: Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, More Accomplished Than You

It's fun to imagine the profile of Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890) on Linkedin...

Skills: Linguist (speak almost 30 languages), ethnologist, explorer, cartographer, author, translator, swordsman, spy, soldier, diplomat


Experience: Traveled extensively in India, Africa, United States, South America, Face pierced by javelin thrown by Somali warrior in coastal skirmish, barely escaped with life, (Scars plainly visible still). Came down with malaria while leading expedition seeking the source of the Nile, was among the very first Westerners to visit the Islamic holy cities of Medina and Mecca, where disguised as an Afghan, I measured and sketched the Ka'aba. Worked the world over as a diplomat for Her Majesty, the Queen of England, knighted for services to Queen and country. Published too many books to list here including first Western unexpurgated version of "The Arabian Nights" and the sexual how-to from India "The Kama Sutra". Was also the basis for two characters in the writing of Rudyard Kipling. British consul in several hemispheres including stints in Damascus and Trieste.

References: Henry Morton Stanley, David Livingstone

Pete's Pantheon: The Impassive Passion of Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton broke into show business the hard way. His role in the family Vaudeville act, starting from the age of three, was to be kicked and thrown around the stage by his father. He bore this treatment with his trademark lack of expression that earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".

Keaton wrote and directed his own films, performed his own stunts, and broke his own neck doing them. He moved with a physical grace that elevated slapstick to poetry. Working within the restrictions of the soundless, colorless world of silent film, he voluntarily limited himself further by giving up the actor's cues of expression to the audience. His silent face, like the silence of his films, invites the audience to fill the gaps with their own imagination.


There is something of Job in Keaton. He endures the absurd punishments of life with an unshakeable faith. The scenery might chew him, but he never chews the scenery. The question is never whether he might endure, but how.