Anton Marrast, Slon Mag #5 cover, 2013
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Hieronymus Bosch - The Garden of Earthly Delights
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The Other Sea

It was 500 years ago in a tiny square of the world on the Caribbean that Vasco Núñez de Balboa first heard of the “other sea”. Balboa and his fellow conquistadors had been inching their way around Hispaniola for 13 years, slaughtering, pillaging, stealing gold off the necks of local women, baptizing tribal leaders, making friends. It was a day in early 1513. Balboa’s men were resting up after successfully conquering the lands of a tribal leader they named Comagre, and whining about the amount of gold they had been allotted. Comagre’s son Panquiaco happened to be lingering nearby. It was one thing for these men to invade their land in the name of the Spanish crown, murdering and plundering as they went. But this petty display of greed was the last straw. Panquiaco jumped up in a fit of rage (or so the story goes) and knocked over the scales used to measure the gold. He then screamed at the Spanish men: "If you are so hungry for gold that you leave your lands to cause strife in those of others, I shall show you a province where you can quell this hunger.” Then Panquiaco told the Spanish of a wealthy kingdom just over the bend where everything was made of gold. The people of this kingdom were so rich, said Panquiaco, they ate off golden plates and drank from golden cups and worshipped in a temple of gold. This sounded pretty good to the conquistadors and Balboa made plans for the next expedition.

On September 1, 1513 Balboa set out along the Isthmus of Panama, the thin strip of land that links North and South Americas. He took with him around 200 Spaniards, a small brigantine, a flotilla of canoes, a handful of local guides and a pack of dogs. The party murdered their way through that isthmus until at last they reached a range of mountains that stretched along the Chucunaque River. The natives told them that, from the top of the mountains, they would see the South Sea (later known as the Pacific) on the horizon. At around 10 a.m. on the 25th of September (or possibly the 27th) in the year 1513, Balboa told his men to stand back. He wanted to ascend the mountain alone; he wanted the name Balboa to stand alone. Vasco Núñez de Balboa reached the top of the mountain by noon, and it was just like the locals said. The ocean was as boundless as it had been in his dreams. From that moment, Vasco Núñez de Balboa would be evermore known as the first European to set eyes on the Pacific Ocean from the vantage of the New World. Not even Christopher Columbus, Balboa’s adventuring mentor, could say the same. Columbus was seven years dead and it was he, Balboa, who had “discovered” the Pacific. From then on, the Atlantic and the Pacific would be connected by the power of human aspiration. It’s not exactly a true story, but no matter. Conquests are always forged in the light of myth. Without mythology human beings just wouldn’t have the stomach for domination.

There is an anonymous 19th-century etching of Balboa standing up to his knees in Pacific waves. He wears a suit of armor and holds up his sword in defiance of geography, claiming the ocean for Spain with his eyes. He could be the Greek god Poseidon emerging from the spray, raising his trident over the quaking earth. They say that as Balboa and his surviving men stood high above the South Sea weeping with joy, the expedition’s chaplain intoned the Te Deum. The men took a tree and shaped it into a cross, surrounding it with a pyramid of stones. They carved crosses on the trees with their swords and they sang:

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth;
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty of thy glory.
We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge.

Here are a few facts about the Pacific Ocean. It is the biggest ocean by far. Four of our seven continents border the Pacific, and Antarctica would too if not for the Southern Ocean. The Pacific comprises 46% of the world’s water surface and one-third of its overall surface. This makes the Pacific Ocean bigger than all the Earth’s land area combined. The Earth is mostly water as we are mostly water, and if we think of ourselves as citizens of the world then all of us are children of the Pacific.

The moles of the new-built California towns, the endless Archipelagos, the skirts of Asiatic lands — all are washed by the same waves of the Pacific. That’s what Herman Melville wrote. “Here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.” The Pacific is the great Potter’s Field of four continents, wrote Melville — the Indian and the Atlantic are merely its arms. From the middle of the Pacific we could be floating in space, and human life would be just as significant. Crossing the Atlantic makes us feel important. Crossing the Pacific makes us feel anxious and small. In the peaceful Pacifico is a Ring of Fire. Beneath the Pacific lies the deepest, darkest hole in the Earth.

by Stefany Anne Golberg, The Smart Set | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Patients Take Control of Their Health Care Online

Not long ago, Sean Ahrens managed flare-ups of his Crohn’s disease—abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhea—by calling his doctor and waiting a month for an appointment, only to face an inconclusive array of possible prescriptions. Today, he can call on 4,210 fellow patients in 66 countries who collaborate online to learn which treatments—drugs, diets, acupuncture, meditation, even do-it-yourself infusions of intestinal parasites —bring the most relief.

The online community Ahrens created and launched two years ago, Crohnology.com, is one of the most closely watched experiments in digital health. It lets patients with Crohn’s, colitis, and other inflammatory bowel conditions track symptoms, trade information on different diets and remedies, and generally care for themselves.

The site is at the vanguard of the growing “e-patient” movement that is letting patients take control over their health decisions—and behavior—in ways that could fundamentally change the economics of health care. Investors are particularly interested in the role “peer-to-peer” social networks could play in the $3 trillion U.S. health-care market.

“Patients sharing data about how they feel, the type of treatments they’re using, and how well they’re working is a new behavior,” says Malay Gandhi, chief strategy officer of Rock Health, a San Francisco incubator for health-care startups that invested in Crohnology.com. “If you can get consumers to engage in their health for 15 to 30 minutes a day, there’s the largest opportunity in digital health care.” (...)

Ahrens, a 28-year-old Web developer who was diagnosed at age 12, says he created the site out of frustration. Billions are spent testing drugs in elaborate clinical trials. But would a simple dietary change bring greater relief? Doctors often don’t know because no one has studied the question.

“As a patient, it’s extremely important to me to get the right information to treat my condition that’s unbiased by economics,” says Ahrens. “Unfortunately that’s not the world we live in.” He says he built the site “to give the power to patients to study things that weren’t currently studied.”

by Ted Greenwald, MIT Technology Review |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

linda vachon, 3437828
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Collage by Beth Hoeckel
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Dina Litovsky
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The Case Against Larry Summers

Lawrence Henry Summers is one of the world's most eminent economists. He won the John Bates Clark Medal given every two years to the nation's best economist under 40—an award so competitive that some economists say it's as prestigious as a Nobel Prize. His fellow economists cite his work even more frequently than that of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke. Summers also has more experience than any senior U.S. official in memory, including Bernanke, in dealing with the financial crises that have become the regular responsibility of Fed chairmen since the Great Depression. He started in the Reagan administration, when he was senior staff economist on the Council of Economic Advisers, then moved on to become Treasury secretary under President Clinton, and, finally, President Obama's chief economic adviser in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Summers holds mostly middle-of-the-road but profoundly informed views on finance that make him fairly uncontroversial as a prospective steward of the Fed's mandate, which is to control inflation, reduce unemployment, and guide economic growth.

So, on paper, Summers is a superb candidate to succeed Bernanke in a post that the brilliant 58-year-old Harvard professor has pined for since his earliest days in Washington, according to longtime associates. Obama is reportedly fond enough of Summers that he may name him in the next few weeks, passing on a chance to appoint Janet Yellen, the widely admired current vice chairwoman, who is said to be the other major contender, as the first female Fed chief in history.

And yet Summers is a very risky choice for chairman—far riskier than Yellen, who would undoubtedly win overwhelming confirmation and was recently rated the Fed's most accurate forecaster since 2009 on issues from growth to jobs to inflation.

The Federal Reserve chairman wields such enormous power, with so little accountability, that he or she is said to be the second-most-powerful person in government after the president. Decisions are habitually made in secret. The job requires a person of great personal tact, subtlety, and self-control. It requires someone who knows how to build consensus at the highest levels for the right kind of policies—someone who possesses the maturity and character to admit error and shift course when needed.

But, according to numerous accounts from those who have worked with him, Summers has often displayed the opposite attributes during his long career. Behind the scenes, he has used his power, combined with intellectual arrogance, to bully opponents into silence, even when they have been proved right. He has refused to allow his dissenters a voice at the table and adopted a policy of never admitting errors.

And Summers has made a lot of errors in the past 20 years, despite the eminence of his research. As a government official, he helped author a series of ultimately disastrous or wrongheaded policies, from his big deregulatory moves as a Clinton administration apparatchik to his too-tepid response to the Great Recession as Obama's chief economic adviser. Summers pushed a stimulus that was too meek, and, along with his chief ally, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, he helped to ensure that millions of desperate mortgage-holders would stay underwater by failing to support a "cramdown" that would have allowed federal bankruptcy judges to have banks reduce mortgage balances, cut interest rates, and lengthen the terms of loans. At the same time, he supported every bailout of financial firms. All of this has left the economy still in the doldrums, five years after Lehman Brothers' 2008 collapse, and hurt the middle class. Yet in no instance has Summers ever been known to publicly acknowledge a mistake.

Wielded by a Fed chairman, those personal traits and policy attitudes are a potentially combustible mix at a time when the Federal Reserve has become, more than ever, the most powerful economic institution on earth, and when re-regulation of the global financial system is substantially in the hands of the Fed. The man whom Summers once considered a model chairman, Alan Greenspan, offers an example of the dangers of being too certain of one's views without much accountability. Back in 1994, Congress instructed the Fed to police unfair and deceptive practices related to mortgage loans. But because the chairman believed in minimal regulation, no rules were ever written; Greenspan quietly slapped down efforts by governors such as Ed Gramlich to warn him; and the Fed did little to intervene in the emerging subprime fraud.

There is no question about Summers's intellect and experience. But would he have the character, temperament, and maturity to listen to a naysayer enough to admit error and reverse course in the next crisis? His history suggests otherwise.

by Michael Hirsh, National Journal |  Read more:

Image via: CNN

How Chris McCandless Died

Twenty-one years ago this month, on September 6, 1992, the decomposed body of Christopher McCandless was discovered by moose hunters just outside the northern boundary of Denali National Park. He had died inside a rusting bus that served as a makeshift shelter for trappers, dog mushers, and other backcountry visitors. Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol:

ATTENTION POSSIBLE VISITORS.
S.O.S.
I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU,
CHRIS McCANDLESS
AUGUST ?

From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days. A driver’s license issued eight months before he perished indicated that he was twenty-four years old and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. After his body was flown out of the wilderness, an autopsy determined that it weighed sixty-seven pounds and lacked discernible subcutaneous fat. The probable cause of death, according to the coroner’s report, was starvation.

In “Into the Wild,” the book I wrote about McCandless’s brief, confounding life, I came to a different conclusion. I speculated that he had inadvertently poisoned himself by eating seeds from a plant commonly called wild potato, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum. According to my hypothesis, a toxic alkaloid in the seeds weakened McCandless to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation. Because Hedysarum alpinum is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no small amount of derision, especially in Alaska.

I’ve received thousands of letters from people who admire McCandless for his rejection of conformity and materialism in order to discover what was authentic and what was not, to test himself, to experience the raw throb of life without a safety net. But I’ve also received plenty of mail from people who think he was an idiot who came to grief because he was arrogant, woefully unprepared, mentally unbalanced, and possibly suicidal. Most of these detractors believe my book glorifies a senseless death. As the columnist Craig Medred wrote in the Anchorage Daily News in 2007,

“Into the Wild” is a misrepresentation, a sham, a fraud. There, I’ve finally said what somebody has needed to say for a long time …. Krakauer took a poor misfortunate prone to paranoia, someone who left a note talking about his desire to kill the “false being within,” someone who managed to starve to death in a deserted bus not far off the George Parks Highway, and made the guy into a celebrity. Why the author did that should be obvious. He wanted to write a story that would sell.

The debate over why McCandless perished, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering, and occasionally flaring, for more than two decades now. But last December, a writer named Ronald Hamilton posted a paper on the Internet that brings fascinating new facts to the discussion. Hamilton, it turns out, has discovered hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of McCandless’s death.

by Jon Krakauer, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: courtesy the family of Chris McCandless.

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Waves. Madrid, Spain - 8/11/10
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The Other Foot

In a Starbucks in suburban North Carolina, Lara and I discussed Jane Aldridge, the then 17-year-old Sea of Shoes blogger whose YSL platforms and Miu Miu pumps are the envy of women three times her age. Dressed in a thrift-store caftan and clunky wooden shoes, Lara—a fashion blogger and vintage store proprietor—moaned, “Every post is about designer shoes that she’s gotten from her parents. Apparently they come from money. Lots and lots of money. It doesn’t give kids a good message, you know? Who can afford a pair of designer shoes when you’re 18?” She shook her head and sipped her chai latte.

Lara was not the first fashion blogger I’d interviewed who cast a suspicious eye on Aldridge and her ilk, the ultra-luxury bloggers who’ve won seats next to editrixes and movie stars at runway shows. (While “fashion blog” includes any blog about fashion, the men and women who post selfies of their own outfits are known as “personal style bloggers.”) Young women like Leandra Medine, the self-proclaimed “Man Repeller” (who still managed to get married in a Marchesa dress and crown of flowers); Rumi Neely of Fashion Toast; and Chiara Ferragni of Blonde Salad are the toasts of the fashion world—on- and off-line. Model-thin and chic, they post pictures on their blogs dressed head-to-toe in the same designer labels that appear in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, sit in the front row at fashion shows, and collaborate with labels.

But while Vogue spreads serve as well-­understood fantasy for average American women, the flesh-and-blood fashion bloggers who wear these clothes evoke more ambivalence. The tension is palpable in Lara’s voice: We expect the microfamous in social media to be more approachable, more like us, more authentic—distinct from the fashion world’s fetishization of absurdly expensive consumer goods, coat-hanger bodies, and impractical heels and gowns. Who are these ultra-luxury bloggers? How do they live what we always assumed were fantasies?

When asked about luxury bloggers like Sea of Shoes, Samantha, an Asian-American fashion blogger who grew up working class, said, “I can’t look at [the blog] for too long. I’m like, I want those shoes, I want that bag. How does she get all these things? Who is she? Who are these people? I don’t know.” While it was a given that Vogue was a ­fantasy, readers struggled with “real people” who wore clothes that appeared in its pages. Samantha sighed, “I’ve always had issues like this, just with class and with fashion. Because I didn’t grow up upper class, but I love fashion so much.”

The disconnect between fashion insiders’ world, where people wear Helmut Lang to the bodega and assistants buy Chloé bags on credit, and the way most women interact with fashion, is acute. With figures that clothes aren’t designed to fit, budgets that prioritize rent and food over designer labels, and work environs that look askance at leather skirts or peplum tops, most women learn to dress themselves through trial and error, picking up tips from friends and family and the odd gem of useful information in fashion magazines.

Personal style blogs are massively popular because many of them show the realities of navigating a love for fashion, a limited budget, and a nonmodel body simultaneously. As part of my research on authenticity in online communities, I began interviewing personal style bloggers, becoming more interested in girls and women who showed off clothes from Target or Goodwill than those who, like Medine and Eldridge, shop with family money. In trying to emulate the stylish figures from the fantastic scenarios played out on runways and in magazine spreads, these women, with their nonmodel figures and noncelebrity budgets, demonstrated fashion’s inherent contradictions. Leather mini-dresses, feathered gowns, and metallic sequins collide with the reality of the size-14 American woman trying to look like Scandal’s Olivia Pope in a white dress from Ann Taylor Loft and a pair of Payless shoes. The women I interviewed came in all shapes, sizes, ethnicities, and ages, often posting pictures of incredibly mundane outfits bought at TJ Maxx. Others were immensely stylish but had microbudgets, relying on their copious amounts of free time to pick through discount bins and Goodwill racks. While many of them boasted only their mother and BFF as readers, others are earning a living—albeit a sort of art-student one—from their blog, though without the Elle features or Lanvin swag. (...)

“Authenticity” is the predominant personal value of our time. It doesn’t mean having good character, or being kind, or even being hot. No, it means… what does it mean, exactly?

by Alice Marwick, TNI |  Read more:

Image: Imp Kerr

Deconstructing: LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” And Trying To Define The Best Song Of The Millennium

[ed Personally, I've always liked "Home"]

As an artist, LCD Soundsystem seemed to perfectly contain enough seeming contradictions as to be a sonic distillation of the times, a representation of what occurs when all the different strands crash together, and they seem to create something new, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it yet. “All My Friends” is their greatest achievement: arguably their most recognizable song, containing all of the various complexities that could be attributed to the band at one point or another, while also being an even further distilled version of the times. It’s hard to say whether it’s supposed to be happy or sad, naïve or disillusioned. Whether it’s supposed to make you feel twenty again or forty before your time. Maybe both, and maybe it carries all the corresponding years in between with it. So once you’ve weighed it down with everything it might be, or is supposed to be, does it still move? Can it?

If “Losing My Edge” was a rush and a push of an opening salvo, “All My Friends” completes the mission statement, refines and clarifies the manifesto. It’s one 7-minute summation of the experience of the millennium, the sense of wanting everything all at once, having access to everything all at once, and ultimately not feeling so much freed as paralyzed at the inescapable weight that comes with carrying all that with you. On one hand all our immediate access is great, but it also denies us a collective experience in the same way as older generations. So it produces nostalgia: for simpler times, or ’80s music, or vague notions of a past that seems easy to wrap your arms around. And it produces a detachment, a sense that there’s this big messy culture out there that you can try to touch but ultimately feels impossible to understand in its entirety. That’s why a band like LCD Soundsystem, and a song like “All My Friends,” capture that zeitgeist-y feeling: they sound singular, but contain the sorts of multitudes required to define an era during which we live with the pop of every era at the same time.

“All My Friends” is about aging, feeling disconnected, simultaneously reckoning with and missing your past. James Murphy turned 37 the year it was released, and it should appeal to people in their 30s. And yet Murphy’s impressionistic verses evoke more widespread experiences than chronologically approaching middle age. This millennium was kicked off with 9/11, and as it progressed we became able to carry entire decades of pop culture and history in our pockets. All of this ages us before our time, whether these were the years in which we grew up, or whether these were the years where we ourselves had children.”You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan/ And the next five years trying to be with your friends again,” Murphy sings. That could be about the struggles of aging and figuring yourself out, but it could also be about the seeming impossibility of navigating the people and culture around you when 2010 suggests 2001, 1987, 1964, and 1999 as much as it suggests itself.

It’s too overwhelming to face that all at once. Is it then any wonder that perhaps the two defining behaviors of our era have become nostalgia and ironic detachment, that we prefer our world through the perfectly faded haze of Instagram or the performative quips of Twitter? Even if you’d argue that the last thirteen years have been primarily characterized by a push and pull between irony and earnestness, it all stems from a sense of disassociation from our time and place — we intentionally say things we don’t mean so we don’t have to bare ourselves to all the noise that comes with infinite digital voices, or we overcompensate and overshare as a proposed salve to the supposedly corrosive effects of ironic living. Murphy buried some of the most earnest pop songs of the last ten years under a veneer of ironic wit. “All My Friends” taps into that same disassociation. It’s like, to paraphrase an old Don Draper quote, watching your life, knowing it’s right there, and futilely trying to break into it. That’s the engine behind “All My Friends,” behind its oscillation between sentimentality and one-liners. Thanks to the speed and abstractions through which we live our lives in the new millennium, you no longer need to be 37 to feel that way.

by Ryan Leas, Stereogum |  Read more:

NSA Shares Unfiltered Intelligence with Israel

[ed. It's like giving free drugs to your friends with the only caveat being "don't do anything stupid (or anything that would embarrass me)". See also: NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel.]

The National Security Agency (NSA) routinely shares “raw” intelligence data with Israel that can include sensitive information about Americans, according to the latest top-secret document leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The 2009 document, a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart, says the U.S. government regularly hands over intercepted communications that have not first been reviewed by U.S. analysts and are likely to contain phone calls and emails of U.S. citizens.

The agreement allows for the possibility that intercepts given to Israel might include the communications of U.S. government officials, in which case Israel is supposed to destroy them immediately. Data on U.S. citizens who aren’t in the government, however, can be kept by Israel for up to a year, according to the document, first published Wednesday by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

The agreement requires Israel to consult an NSA liaison officer when it finds data on Americans and to adhere to U.S. rules designed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens, a process known as “minimization.” But it’s unclear how that requirement is monitored or enforced, because the agreement expressly says it is not legally binding.

It’s no secret that the United States and Israel cooperate closely against intelligence targets of mutual interest, such as Syria and Iran. But the sharing of unprocessed electronic intercepts raises the specter that Israel could have used U.S. intelligence to carry out operations of which the United States disapproves. The Obama administration has condemned, for example, the assassinations of several Iranian nuclear scientists in which many analysts believe Israel had a hand.

“One of the biggest concerns in all intelligence-sharing relationships is that the partner would use the data to take action that would result in killing somebody or doing something outside the scope of what our government might consider appropriate,” said a former senior NSA official who refused to be identified. “The worry is they might go off and bomb somebody and assassinate somebody.”

The U.S. decision to provide Israel unfiltered electronic intelligence feeds raises questions about why American officials would trust Israel to respect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

by Ken Dilanian, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: James Emery, The Guardian

Richmond, California and Eminent Domain

Very early this morning, the city council in Richmond, California, narrowly voted to move forward with a plan to aid underwater homeowners. It's a plan so controversial that everyone from Wall Street investment banks, to the National Association of Realtors, to U.S. congressmen, to state politicians, to the Federal Housing Finance Agency has weighed in.

Five years into the housing crisis, the city of about 105,000 and its Green Party mayor figure they've run out of better options – and out of patience with federal solutions that never came – to ease the local foreclosure glut. The median price of homes in town has dropped to less than half of what it was at the height of the housing boom. And the city has estimated that about 51 percent of its homeowners are underwater. Richmond is in worse shape than most towns sacked by the housing bubble: Its home values are low, its unemployment and poverty rates are high, and its residents in danger of foreclosure are unlikely to have the principal on their mortgages reduced any time soon.

In this position, Richmond has now become the only municipality in the country to seriously consider using eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages from the investors who currently hold them. The city would not seize the properties themselves – as more typically happens in eminent domain cases – but would use the power to essentially purchase the mortgages at their current market value (against the wishes of the banks that hold them).

A company called Mortgage Resolution Partners would help the city fund and manage the purchases, ultimately selling the restructured mortgages to new investors at rates that would keep the current residents in their homes.

So far, every other local government that's been tempted by this idea has ultimately abandoned it.

The scheme, Mother Jones wrote earlier this year, "is almost as complicated as the derivatives and collateralized debt obligations that caused this mess to begin with."

But the idea at its core is relatively simple: Richmond sent letters to the banks and investors currently holding 624 mortgage notes on homes in the city, asking to buy them at current market value. The banks said no. Now the city hopes to purchase them anyway, citing a government power more commonly wielded to take private property for constructing public infrastructure like highways.

Mortgage Resolution Partners has been pitching the proposal to distressed cities for more than a year. But, so far, every other local government that's been tempted by the idea has ultimately abandoned it in the face of growing pressure from the banking industry, realtor groups and even the federal government.

by Emily Badger, Atlantic Cities |  Read more:

Image: Flickr user BasicGov

Robert Doisneau, Baiser Passage Versailles, Paris, 1950.
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Recalling Buzzwinkle

Every autumn in recent years our boreal neighbors in Sweden and Norway have regaled the rest of the world with tales of drunken moose. In most of the stories, the moose have gotten smashed eating fermented apples, the active ingredient in applejack.

Sweden and Norway have lots of moose and loads of apple trees. Alaska has fewer moose and a paucity of fruit trees, but where the two entities overlap -- in Anchorage, for example -- reports of drunken moose also abound. Alaska’s best-known public inebriate may have been Buzzwinkle.

Buzzwinkle’s name was coined by Anchorage Daily News columnist Julia O’Malley in November 2007 after a moose downed a few too many fermented crabapple cocktails in the courtyard of Bernie’s Bungalow Lounge, across the street from the Nordstrom store in downtown Anchorage. When O’Malley and I arrived, the massive bull was standing rigid, knees locked, with his wide-set eyes fixed in an inscrutable expression. A long strand of small white lights tangled in his antlers attested to some careless twig noshing in Town Square earlier in the day. The most obvious sign of life was the cloud of vapor venting from his nostrils with every deep exhalation. He was blotto, and he knew it. Too large to fit in a taxi, we left him to sleep it off in the fenced courtyard. After he revived, Anchorage Daily News photographer Erik Hill captured Buzzwinkle’s unapologetic, nonchalant departure -- party lights still firmly affixed.

Although nameless before that incident, Buzzwinkle had been a well-known character in downtown Anchorage for years. He was often seen strolling slowly along urban sidewalks or crossing streets surrounded by what in Alaska passes for skyscrapers. Buzzwinkle was street smart. When I worked as an Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist, I once watched him wait patiently for a red light to stop traffic on West Ninth Avenue before confidently stepping onto the crosswalk and ambling into the Delaney Park Strip. He specialized in foraging on ornamental shrubs and the vestiges of birch and other native trees that remain in the city’s center. Undisturbed moose are notoriously phlegmatic. Buzzwinkle was unperturbed by people and traffic. He was large enough to command respect from awestruck commuters and shoppers. It was seldom necessary for him to throw his weight around.

by Rick Sinnott, AK Dispatch |  Read more:

Image: Rick Sinnott

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