Donna Sandstrom's Open Salon Blog

Levon Helm and Lessons Learned

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 21:04:20 -0400

The only Levon Helm story I have is the ticket I didn't buy to see the Last Waltz - the concert, not the movie.

I was 20 years old, working part-time at an ice-cream shop in Santa Cruz while I went to school. It was a great gig - paid a little above minimum wage, had flexible hours I could fit in around classes, and came with a discount that made me the most popular person at every pot luck I went to.

Polar Bear made its own ice cream - the only place in the County that did, back then. There were plenty of flavors, from rocky road to bubble gum, but by far the most popular were the flavors made with honey. Pot-addled students, surfers and musicians couldn't get enough of the carob mint and fresh banana. People drove from over the hill for the honey almond and cafe au lait.

Hot summer nights, the line would be out the door for hours. We developed great arms from carving out the giant scoops, hand-packing pint after pint.

When things were quiet, we made Bear Paws - ice cream sandwiches made with oatmeal or chocolate chip cookies, and a scoop of vanilla or Turkish coffee ice cream, all dipped in chocolate. Truly a treat ahead of its time.

One night Tom, a regular, told me about tickets for a concert he'd heard were going on sale - The Band's last concert, at Winterland. There were going to be special guests - and they were going to serve Thanksgiving dinner, too. Tickets were $25. Did I want to go?

I had to decide quickly. $25 was a lot of money, on an ice-cream scooper's hourly. I liked the Band but decided it was too expensive. No, I told him. Too much.

::insert sobbing sounds::

When he came in to the shop the day after the show, still glowing, and told me who had been there, I felt a little sick, and not from the Bear Paws. Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison...Ringo! Dear god, it was a gathering for the ages. And I missed it.

♦ ♦♦

I am not sure what the moral of this story is except - go see live music whenever you can. You never know when it might be your only chance to hear a true, original American voice - something that will change your life forever.

A few years later, in 1978, friends asked if I wanted their extra ticket to see Bruce Springsteen at Winterland. I hadn't really listened to him, and didn't own a single album. It would be the first time any of us would see him live. This time, I said yes.

I don't remember how much that ticket cost, but I do remember Bruce tearing up the stage, jump-starting my heart. Lesson learned.

R.I.P. Levon!

Sad Men and Breaking Bad

Mon, 2 Apr 2012 23:04:41 -0400

"What is wrong with you people? You’re all so cynical – you don’t smile, you smirk." (Megan in Mad Men Season 5, Episode 2)

Like a lot of people, I loved Mad Men its first few seasons. I was attracted as much by the characters as the novelty of the setting. The 60s looked fresh and new all over again. I loved watching to see how the seminal events of the decade would play out on the screen, compared to how I remembered them (I am Sally’s age).

Over time, I realized that the writers may have gotten the details of the period right, but they’ve totally missed its soul. Like the clueless Don at the Rolling Stones concert in last night's episode, they’ve missed the essence of the decade even as they're surrounded by its trappings.

The series revolves around the question, who is Don Draper? Despite more twists and turns than Hwy 1, Don turns out to be exactly what he seems - a vacuous cad, who cares about, what, exactly? Who knows?

Last season, I watched with interest when he got together with the one character who was his equal in intellect, age and power. Of course, he broke up with her.

I tried to find another character to root for. Betty slapped her daughter. Joan cheated on her husband, the CFO lied to his wife, and they all began to seem like a smarmy, interchangeable lot.

By the end of the season, I realized there was not one character I liked. They were equally self-serving, dishonest, and despicable —variations on a thoroughly modern theme.

Mad Men is set in the 60s, but steeped in a narcissism that has much more to do with the Bush years than the Kennedy era. Like the ever-present smoke drifting through the impeccable sets, the writers filter the era through a cynical, toxic, and utterly predictable haze.

The writers of Breaking Bad, on the other hand, have made every character on that show someone you can’t ignore - fully drawn, human, and somehow recognizable.

Over several seasons, the series traces the evolution of a mild-mannered chemistry teacher into a meth-making drug lord - every step as believable and surprising as the next.

How did the writers get me to feel sympathetic for a meth-head who shoots a man point-blank as he opens his front door, or a man who is in the process of selling out everything and everyone he once cared about?

Hubris is the last sin, and Walter White is living it. Dare you to look away.

Set in the flat bleakness of the Arizona desert, Breaking Bad's characters tell a timeless story in a modern era.

Mad Men takes place in one of the most dynamic eras of the last century, but its characters ring as hollow as the Barbie and Ken dolls that Sally will soon outgrow. It has no more connection to the 60s than it does to the moon.

♣♥♦

I tuned in for the first episodes of Mad Men this year to see if anything had changed.

Nope.

Don doesn’t have the grace to see his three young children safely to the door of their mother’s house, but he does have the time to make a snarky comment about her to them.

Betty’s chief concern about dying is not that she will leave her children motherless, or miss them, but that she won't be represented fairly to them by Don's new wife. Sheesh.

Why does anyone care about these characters? (And why, exactly, are the writers so fixated on characters who have sex on the floor with women who say No?) I don’t know, I don’t care, and I don’t want to.

My prediction: Don’s new young wife is going to tire of his cynicism and break up with him soon. Me too.

Truth and Consequences

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:11:33 -0500

Yesterday, a story was posted here about a woman in Seattle who reportedly miscarried days after being pepper-sprayed and kicked by police. The story was an Editor's Pick and cross-referenced on the front page of Salon. Like a chant echoed by a crowd, the headline was borne aloft through social media. Commenters piled on, outraged.

If it is true, the story is horrific, and the outrage is deserved. But - the story might not be true.

I followed the links in the post to an article in one of our local papers, the Stranger. Almost immediately, the Stranger was having trouble corroborating the protester's story. Today, the Seattle Times reports the same problems trying to verify her account.

There are plenty of things to be outraged and horrified about. Can we save our collective energy for things that have passed at least the first level of fact-checking?

Otherwise we risk devolving further into a nation of Fox-watchers, mistaking memes for truth, and blindly repeated stories for investigative reporting. As writers, editors, and readers, we need to be more careful. The truth will out, so long as we have the patience and tenacity to find it.

Hope on the Elwha

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 18:09:05 -0400

Mouth of the Elwha

We spent the third weekend of September in Port Angeles, helping to celebrate the Elwha dams coming down. The 45-mile long Elwha River once produced all six species of Pacific salmonids, including record-setting Chinook salmon.

The return of the river to its natural course is great news for hundreds of species, but especially for the Endangered southern resident orcas. These pods (J, K and L) prefer Chinook salmon above all other prey.

The Elwha and Glines Canyon dams were built in the early 1900s, to provide hydroelectricity for a pulp mill in Port Angeles, and other other communities around the Olympic Peninsula.

The dams were installed without a fish passage, and blocked access to all but the first five miles of the river. Over 70 miles of upstream habitat was lost to returning runs. Within five years of the dams being built, anadromous species had disappeared from the Elwha's upper reaches.

Looking south from the rivermouth

Remnants of the native salmon runs remain, though their numbers are severely reduced. From an estimated pre-dam size of over 300,000, today’s runs total about 3,000 fish. The Seattle Times reports that native Chinook have been reduced to a record low of 500 fish.

The removal of the dams is the largest project of its kind in North America. It will take 2 to 3 years to bring the dams down, and longer to disperse the 24 million cubic feet of sediment has accumulated behind them. It will take decades to restore the habitat, and the salmon runs.

Will the salmon recover, and will they return in numbers big enough, and soon enough, to make a difference for the orcas? Only time will tell. But the weekend signaled a historic step in the right direction.

We take heart in the resilience and endurance of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, who have been working towards this moment for generations, and never gave up. Like the salmon who haven’t stopped trying to go home, though their way has been blocked for over 100 years.

Whale Trail Booth on the Pier

On Saturday, we had a booth at the Celebrate Elwha festival on the City Pier. About 1000 people attended the event, which featured art, music, food and a simulcast of the dam removal ceremony.

On Sunday, we participated in Explore Elwha, which featured hands-on activities at stations throughout the watershed. Our station was near the mouth of the Elwha, at a glorious spot on what turned out to be a sunny day.

Visitors helped us “feed the whales” - decorating salmon drawings, and posting them on boards for J, K and L pods.

Feeding the Whales

Salmon Wishes for the Whales

Fish Wish Detail

On the way home, Kathy and I stopped by the Elwha River Bridge, which has a pedestrian overpass, and provides easy access to the river.

After talking about them all weekend, we were thrilled to see schools of Chinook salmon pooling in the river, heading upstream. In the shadows of the shallows they were hard to pick out, until a movement - a sudden splash or the flash of a fin - gave them away. We were hushed and awed at their effort to clear each riffle; the epic journey coming to an end at our feet.

Salmon carcasses, spawned and spent, collected in a ghostly white pile in an eddy downstream. Along the bank, blood-stained rocks told of a recent bear feast. Salmon are a keystone species, feeding not just orcas in the ocean, but over 100 species of animals and plants throughout the forest.

We wondered how many creatures were watching from the woods, waiting for the humans to leave so they could start fishing again.

Looking upriver

Sources for this post, and to learn more about the Elwha:

Seattle Times Special Report - Elwha: the grand experiment

Olympic National Park FAQ

Glines Canyon Dam Removal Process

Elwha Dam Removal Process

Thanks and congratulations to the Olympic National Park, NatureBridge and all the event organizers.

Thanks especially to Whale Trail volunteers Kathy, Ken, Evangeline and Jay, who made it possible for us to be there.

A version of this is cross-posted on my blog at www.thewhaletrail.org.

Bright Star, Dim Oscar

Tue, 2 Feb 2010 18:02:14 -0500

Best Costume Design. Really, Academy? That’s it? As a good online friend would say, Pffft.

The most overlooked movie of the year, by far, is Bright Star. From the opening shot—an extreme closeup of a needle pulling through fabric—you know you are in the hands of a cinematic master. This intimate look at an everyday act makes it a wondrous thing, as if we have never quite seen it before.

Jane Campion, who wrote as well as directed, has created an incandescent and utterly satisfying story of young love—romantic, and tragic, and true.

Its title taken from his poem of the same name, Bright Star tells the story of the poet John Keats and his neighbor, Fanny Brawne. It follows their relationship from the time of their first meeting, through and after his death.

It is a relationship that develops naturally and believably; each coming into their own as they awaken to each other, and the sensual joys of the world around them.

Their relationship is complicated by his poverty—he’s not seen as a suitable match for Fanny—and by the jealousness of his best friend, who resents her intrusion into their bachelor lives.

Time and circumstance bring their critics around. Even her mother and the doubting friend yield to the understanding that this is not just a bad case of puppy love, but a heavy dose of the real thing.

Abbie Cornish, who plays Fanny Brawne, gives a flawless performance as a young girl awakening to herself, and to love. Ben Wishaw plays Keats with just the right amount of passion and angst—acutely sensitive, but never cloying.

Can you watch this and not be reminded of your own first love, when the world was lit up and new? No, you cannot. Like a great poem itself, the movie delivers us that world again.

If God is in the details, the details are in this film: the wind coming in through the open window in Fanny’s room; her hands as she touches the wall between them; the new coat she sews when she sees his old one, threadbare.

When the inevitable happens, her breakdown is almost unbearable.

In contrast, Up in the Air was a confused, bleak mess of a movie, whose characters and plot points played like cartoons. It was written by a young Hollywood screenwriter who seems to have stumbled across the big themes of our time, but didn’t have a clue what to do with them. The fact that it’s up for Best Picture, and Bright Star isn’t…I’m losing hope for Hollywood. Again.