Tuesday 22 July 2008

“Again with the retreads!”

I’m not going to apologize for this since I’m busy, am seriously UNDER-inspired, and am worried about the AGIA vote that is happening this week. On Dangerously Ignorant Ground is a review of Steven Seagal’s directorial debut for my “Hollywood on Alaska” undergraduate course that I took with Dr. Cole. This class traced Hollywood’s fascination with the Great Land from Nanook of the North up to On Deadly Ground, Seagal’s atrocious movie that is the subject of this essay.

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The movie I chose to discuss for this paper was On Deadly Ground, Steven Seagal’s directorial debut. This 1994 Warner Brother’s release, written by Ed Horowitz and Robin U. Russin, adds a new element to the Hollywood illusions of Alaska. Relying upon staid stereotypes and ill-conceived spiritual themes combined with traditional Hollywood Alaskana nature scenes and a new self-important sense of political correctness. This new political correctness distinquishes this film as one made in the sensitive 1990’s, where corporate profits are represented as evil and eskimos as the salt of the earth. This is not a significant departure from traditional Hollywood views of eskimos as peace-loving yet inherently simple and easily dupped. Seagal’s eskimos were dupped when the oil companies came to buy leases twenty years prior, now they are empowered with all the spirit of Greenpeace and the American Indian Movement. Somehow unable to take legal recourse with the fictional oil company, Aegis Oil, the eskimo spiritual leader Silook (Chief Irvin Brink) prays to the spirits for a man to come and help them. This man is Steven Seagal, playing Forrest Taft.Taft is a mysterious oil firefighter with his own entourage and private helicopter who, by the power of his receding hairline and gift shop Indian leather jacket, has the power to snuff out dangerous oil fires the world over. As On Deadly Ground opens, Taft is somewhere in the tree-lined, mountain-rimmed oil derrick city of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska about to kill another dangerous fire. His old friend Hugh Palmer (Richard Hamilton) suspects that this fire was caused by shoddy welding work, purposely done so that an accident would occur. Aegis Oil’s apparently only stockholder, Michael Jennings (Michael Caine), does not care for this snooping around by the old man and spits through his teeth to his trusty man servant, MacGruder (John C. McGinley), to kill Hugh.

In a bar after the fire, Taft and Hugh are sitting at a bar while an obese oil worker (Mike Starr) berates and assaults an Alaskan Native. Since Alaska does not have police in this movie, Taft takes it upon himself to punch Starr into a bloody mess - a truly selfless exhibition of manliness. The Native, grateful that he is not the aforementioned mess, tells Taft a hokey line, “you’re about to go on a sacred journey.” Shortly after this, the montage of Hugh’s bludgeoning death is interwoven with Jennings blaming eco-terrorists for the destruction is not the emotional highpoint that Seagal intended. This use of violence as a problem-solving tool occurs many times in the movie but never again is it a viable solution for Jennings. In the Post-Hugh environment, Taft is duped by Jennings to explore a faulty valve in a pump station, which is subsequently blown-up by MacGruder. Wise now to the evil intentions of Aegis Oil, Taft vows to embody the bear spirit and go on the his spiritual journey.

Paralleling the transformation of the Eskimos, Taft now realizes that oil is bad and nature is good and must be protected at the cost of scores of oil workers’ lives. This occurs while Taft is recuperating in an “elaborate, nineteenth-century Eskimo village - a dozen grey-brown sod and log structures of various shapes accoutered with drying racks, meat caches, kayaks, and dogsleds.” This implausible recreation of a village dead for more than a century is the strongest Hollywood theme in the film. Unable to accept that Eskimos now live in pre-fab government housing with every amenity that suburban America possesses, the Seagal was trying to sell the wholesome image of Eskimos as simpler people, unemcumbered by the nastiness of western life. Silook, evidently in the presence of a great man, Taft, tells him that he is the spirit warrior with the bear and raven as his spirit guides. This pseudo-spiritualness continues with a mindbending Timothy Leary-esque trip through Taft’s subconsious. The viewer is treated to a visual lap dance by a silicone Eskimo woman interspliced with Taft walking down a creek with a raven and a bear leading him to Silook. None of this moves the story along, it is simply a screen test for a naked woman on the Warner Brothers payroll. Seagal probably had hoped that it would lend some credibility to him as an actor, this film is in many regards his own Dances With Wolves.

Turgid with bear and raven strength, Seagal and his Chinese actress/Eskimo role sidekick, Masu (Joan Chen) ride a snowmachine (dogsleds are for daily travel, snowmachines are for emergencies according to Masu) from the village to the Aegis site, supposedly located in Prudhoe Bay but filmed in Valdez. Ignoring geography, as any self-respecting Hollywood Alaska flick does, the trip takes barely 3 minutes of screen time. The third act of the film adds ignorance of cultures to geography. As Masu jumps on a horse, Taft asks her, “I didn’t know you could ride a horse?” He is answered with “Of course, I’m a Native American.” This repellent exchange between the two stars forced me to turn off the VCR for more than one hour as the rage inside me calmed to a mere simmer. Ignorance of facts is tolerable to us moviegoers since we suspend our disbelief everytime a movie is watched but this blatant disregard of well-known cultures is unbearable. As a film attempting to bridge the gap between Hollywood action and Native issues, this film fails miserabley because of this one scene. Disregarding basic historical and cultural facts so flippantly in the name of a minor dialogue exchange is atrocious, Seagal and the suits at the WB know better. This is an example of the dumbing down of films, an act that is even worse in light of the terrible misconceptions already in place about Alaska thanks to Hollywood.

The Masu character is just a woman who needs protection from Taft as they infiltrate the Aegis One platform. Unlike previous Alaska films where the maiden in distress speaks and offers opinions, Masu is like no one else in Alaskan film. While she is Native, she isn’t any better at traditional Native activities than Taft, who seems to have no diffeciencies at all. Masu seems just be along for the ride, a token gesture to the Eskimo villagers who healed Taft; she is some unexplained part of Taft’s spiritual journey through Alaska. In killing Jennings, Taft is shown as the avenging spirit of all Natives, everywhere. As the greedy capitalists dies in the explosion of his beloved Aegis one, the viewers are expected to welcome a new ideal of Seagal’s: only by returning to simpler ways of the Eskimos can Earth survive. Your disbelief is supposedly also suspended as the destruction of the oil platform is supposedly going to stop an oil spill, or so Taft explains.

Somethings probably need to be explained to the writers and star of this movie too. While Native Alaskans do live in rural areas, sod houses have not been en vogue for more than 150 years. Seagal, while unable to accept the fact that his beloved spirit brothers and sisters have succumbed to the evils of western civilization, is still just continuing the misplaced Hollywood facts about Alaska. What is new to this film is the environmental concerns and impact of the oil industry on Hollywood’s scenic and cultural beauty of Alaska. If not for Aegis being anthing but a racist and repulsive company with no regard for federal and state laws or human life the viewer would not understand Seagal’s vengeance. By exploding the Alaskan oil industry into something a million times worse than it really is, Seagal is continuing the dominant theme of Alaska in film: ignorance.

Ignorance is the lifeblood of Hollywood because it is simple to do and makes money for the industry. Historical or current facts are easier to destroy and bastardize than accept and push on an audience. The more unbelievable something is, the more the audience wants to believe, On Deadly Ground is no exception to this Hollywood rule. Seagal has created a film that continues the tradition of placing asian actors in major native roles, confusing Alaskan geography, and destroying basic cultural facts. The only thing that is new to the continuing Hollywood view is oil, and that too is just as bastardized as everything else Seagal does. This addition is just as improbable and worthless to factual accuracy as everything else Hollywood conjured up for Alaska.

Sunday 13 July 2008

NOTE: This is a reprint from a paper, “If You Can’t Take a Joke, Get Out of the Comedy Club”, I wrote in college for Prof. Terrence Cole in 1999. The ongoing AGIA legislative special session reminded me of the insanity that was the building of TAPS. I’m sure that if the natural gas pipeline ever does get built we’ll hear similar stories like the one I discussed in my paper. Oh, and the tone of the paper was keeping inline with the tone of the class.

Construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline began in 1975 and ended in 1977, with the first crude flowing from the oil field at Prudhoe Bay in July 1977. Along the way oil companies learned many things about building pipelines that had never arisen before. The pipeline was not like the conventional pipelines that were simply buried in the ground and largely forgotten about until they either exploded or leaked so much that it became cost effective to fix them. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline required a special design so the underlying layer of frozen ground that existed for nearly 500 of the 800 miles of the length would not thaw and subsequently destroy the pipeline. The distance of the pipeline was great and so were the natural obstacles lying in the proposed path. Nearly 800 river crossings, four mountain ranges to overcome, and the Alaskan weather. While the temperature rises to 90 above in summer, it falls to 60 below in winter. This weather created not only the rivers, the tundra, the arctic coastal plain, the permafrost but also it formed an illogical image of Alaska as a location nearly uninviting as Antarctica.

While Alaska was known to the oil companies as a great and cold land, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, as initially designed, was only a 48-inch diameter pipe laid underground for 800 miles – as if it went from Fargo to Dallas. Prudhoe Bay to Valdez is not the ‘Great American Desert’, it is 5 distinct ecological regions: the Arctic Coast, the Brooks Mountain Range, the Interior, the Alaska Range, and the Northern Pacific Coast. Permafrost lies under the entire ground from Prudhoe to the Brooks Range, discontinuous until Fairbanks, and in isolated pockets to Valdez on the coast. 90° crude oil flowing in an uninsulated, underground pipe will thaw that permafrost – destroying its own foundation and creating an ecological, economical, and public relations nightmare for Alaska and the pipeline service company Alyeska. Fortunately for all parties involved, the pipeline was built with insulated pipes half underground and half above with rivers crossed either with bridges or sunken pipe. Environmentally, the completed pipeline was sound and successfully addressed nearly 100 percent of the problems initially raised. [FN1]  Still, the pipeline suffered great from human intelligence as the first year of service dawned.

Pump Station 8 is one of the twelve planned but eleven actual built pump stations along the pipeline. The object of a pump station is to “insure that crude oil continues travelling through the pipeline system at prescribed flow rates and pressure levels.” [FN2] To accomplish this if the oil flow rate is below pressure, booster pumps force the oil into centrifugal (or mainline) pumps powered by aircraft engine turbines, which send the oil back into the pipeline at the desired pressure. Each pump station has three mainline pumps and one turbine but only two pumps run at one time. As the first crude flowed down the pipeline on June 20th, 1977, only five pump stations were online because the initial capacity of the line was merely 600,000 barrels a day. As flow through the line hypothetically increased to 2 million barrels a day, stations 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11 (never built), and 12 would come online to help with the flow.

On Friday July 8, 1977 the first crude oil traveled to Pump Station 8, forty-one miles east of Fairbanks, along the Alaska Highway. As the crude entered and then passed through the station, everything went smoothly – as planned by Alyeska. A nitrogen leak that caused concern the previous Monday was fixed and the oil flowed constantly and within parameters until it reached 30 miles south of the station. The 390,000 barrels of oil flowing through the pipeline that day were part of the test run before the full load was going to be forced through. During the 10 weeks preceding July 8th pump station crews practiced daily working procedures at the station. One of these procedures was for maintenance workers to notify the rest of the station when work occurred. Even though the leading edge of oil was flowing 30 miles to the south of the station, the flow pressure dropped and an additional booster pump was needed. At this time workers were fixing one booster pump at the station yet other workers switched valves on to allow oil to flow through this pump. Miscommunication between Alyeska workers caused the destruction of the pump housing, the control building and the death of one employee, Charles Lindsey.

Instead of following the rules set for them by Alyeska, certain workers took it upon themselves to modify the rules because they did not apply to them. Safety is too often a second thought to getting the job done in time. Maintenance procedures included written notification of the work to other workers and closing valves to keep oil from entering the unit under repair. Since no notification was made to other pipeline workers, it was presumed, as it should be, that no repairs were being made on the booster pump. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline may be an engineering marvel to many across Alaska, pipeline workers marvelously ruined Pump Station 8 by assuming safety and not doing safety.

Maybe it was all a joke to these men near Fairbanks. As the crude shot in a geyser through the structure’s roof and ignited and the explosion destroying the control building, what were these workers thinking? They all were veteran pipeline workers. All had done construction work on the length of the pipeline and must have made mistakes before but nothing as serious as taking the life of a co-worker. To the laborers who toiled at the bottom of the pipeline food chain from 1975 until 1977, one phrase comes to mind when discussing pipeline mishaps. This phrase covered all mistakes be they major or minor, accidents or deliberately. [FN3]  “Fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.” Usually this quip was uttered not by the laborers but by the machine operators, those who had at their disposal millions of dollars worth of equipment. All ready to do damage to pipeline camp or be driven into ditches, rivers, or lakes. This casual accidental killing of another individual loomed over the pipeline for two weeks before Larry Wertz was arrested for attempting to blow up the pipeline.

Seventeen miles north of Fairbanks at 3 a.m. on July 20th, 1977, Wertz placed dynamite on the elevated portion of the pipeline and set them off. To his chagrin, only the pipeline insulation layer was damaged along with slight dents to the horizontal pipe supports. Five days later, as 26 year-old Wertz walked down a stretch of the Elliot Highway only 2 miles from the explosions, Alaska State Troopers arrested him. First lying to troopers by saying that he worked a mining claim then telling them that he was merely caretaking a claim and was in fact a fur trapper. The claim, just long of 2 miles from the pipeline, gave the troopers a hint that Wertz was behind the explosion as they found commercial dynamite at the site.

Still there was no motive behind Larry Wertz’s actions. After undergoing psychiatric examinations prior to his trial and during his trial, no reasons arose. He moved to Alaska in 1974 and worked as a laborer on the pipeline until 1976 when he began trapping near Fairbanks. His pipeline experience was near Delta and by all accounts he was no worse and no better than other laborers. One can conjecture that this act of destruction was nothing more than a joke. Wertz may have just wanted to see what would happen if he set off some dynamite on the pipe. He had some available to him at the mining claim, so why not? It may have been a mistake but as the adage goes, “fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

So much money was thrown at these men as they worked the pipeline. Upwards of $1000 a week at a time when $20,000 was a respectable yearly income for middle America. There existed no reason to respect your job, the pipeline, or others. You were going to get paid regardless of your ineptitude or quality. Making daily work interesting for as long as possible temporarily staved off the inevitable boredom. The pipeline was not a massive public works project that, in theory atleast, propels the good of the whole into some new era. The pipeline was a privately funded project for the sole purpose of further enriching the richest companies in the world. Filling the already bulging coffers of Exxon and British Petroleum with billions of consumer dollars is not exactly a religious experience.

By not caring what happens, the maintenance workers and Larry Wertz had gotten rich off the pipeline during construction. It didn’t matter to any of these men that living in that style is not safe to others nor appropriate to any society other than anarchy. It is said that all Alaskans are quasi-anarchists anyway so screwing with multi-national corporations is par for the course. The flip side to this logic is that Alaskans don’t like to be bothered by other people. This could be a reason for the multitude of cyclone fences and No Trespassing signs in the Interior region. Delving into the psychological motives of misguided pipeline workers is foolhardy at best; still these two mishaps can be summed up in the popular laborer phrase, “fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.”

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1. Pipeline crossings for migratory herd animals like caribou harm the natural cycles of the great arctic herds (Arctic and Western Porcupine) by being too far apart and not large enough in number. The Nelchina herd in the Copper River Basin has not been effected since its habit is mainly wooded and the animals are accustomed to obstructions. (Coates, P. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy page 267).
2. Alyeska Pipeline Service Company news release June 1977, quoted in Fairbanks Daily News-Miner Pumps Regulated Flow Rate, Pressure (July 9, 1977).
3. Ed McGrath The Alaska Pipeline, 1977 page 162.

Thursday 10 July 2008

With my choices down to the Outback Sport/Impreza 5-door and the Legacy Outback I realized I had to make a decision. So I enlisted the help of the massive online community over at the Car Lounge. They have now spoken.

My new car is a 2008 Subaru Outback 2.5i, Newport Blue over Silver (yes, it’s a two-tone!), with heated seats but just a CD-player and no CD-changer. It’s also an automatic because they ran out of manuals the day I decided to buy it and the 2009’s didn’t have the 0.0 APR and the rebate. So, one’s got to take the good (cheaper cost) with the bad (auto trans). It’s got significantly more room than the Outback Sport/Impreza yet gets the same mileage (probably because they have the same engine - 2.5l - and the same transmission and are withing 300 pounds of each other) and more room for passengers. Seems like a win-win for me.

Just a couple things so far that annoy me. First, the lack of steering wheel audio controls. My old Dodge Dakota had these. My wife’s Xterra has them. And while the center stack is closer (I can actually change/use the radio quite easily which isn’t possible w/ the Xterra or Dakota) I’ve got this muscle-memory for the steering wheel audio controls. So I’ll have to break my habit. Second, and this is the worst one so far, the radio doesn’t get louder when you speed up and get quieter when you slow down. I don’t know why this is so. I’ve not had a vehicle’s audio do this since my 1991 Dodge Ramcharger.

The great thing about this car is that it stops really well. Perhaps I’m not the ‘target’ audience since I came from a seven-year-old truck but the four-wheel disc brakes with ABS work really well (as I found out on my commute home this evening thanks to a speeding ambulance changing the stop lights on me with no notice) and it’s super-duper quiet which is a lot different from the old V8 truck. Plus, this car is partial zero-emissions vehicle which (truth be told) means almost nothing to me since I (a) dislike California as a matter of principle, and (b) don’t drive that much. But, since I love to (a) use my BBQ grill, (b) fly in planes, (c) participate in the mass-market consumer-driven economy of world goods, and (d) fart a lot, I think my choice will be helpful to the environment (even though I want ANWAR opened up, like coal-gasification, and dislike the EPA mileage requirements but love high gas taxes) and that makes me smile.

Monday 7 July 2008

I sold my beautiful Dodge Dakota truck this afternoon. Tomorrow I shall pick-up my new car from the Subaru dealership.

Thursday 26 June 2008

Friday 20 June 2008

The man who murdered Robert Wall at the Crossroads Lounge in November 2002 will not stand trial. Following five years of contentious pretrial litigation, which we prevailed at every turn, the murderer died of natural causes while in Department of Corrections’ custody last night. There will be no closure for the victim’s family.