Knik Philharmonic Orchestra

Frank Prewitt on the Stand

2007-06-30T09:30:00.000-07:00

Frank Prewitt, former Commissioner of Corrections for the State of Alaska, testified for six hours Friday.

Seventeen years ago, I was director of Alaska's biggest halfway house, the Cordova Center, in Anchorage. Frank Prewitt was Alaska's Commissioner of Corrections. I was heading up the efforts by the owners of the Cordova Center to have the facility become the first correctional institution in Alaska to be fully accredited by the American Correctional Association. Soon after we passed the accreditation review, I met Frank. We hit it off, right away. Of the four Commissioners I met while working in the Corrections field, Prewitt was by far the most competent.

In 1993 I left the field and turned to teaching music. Prewitt, through contacts with Allvest, the company which then owned the Cordova Center and three other halfway houses in Alaska, left employment with the state behind, to take a job with Allvest for $150,000 per year. Allvest was then bought by Cornell Correctional Industries in 1998. Prewitt stayed on as a consultant.

During the time period between when I left Allvest and last year, Prewitt was involved in many of the company's questionable efforts to create privatized programs in Delta, Whittier, Anchorage, the Kenai Penninsula, and in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough. Those are the Alaska programs. Ultimately, after the Cornell buyout, Prewitt helped in the partnership of Veco and Cornell to build privatized prisons in Alaska and elsewhere.

From my experience in the private jail/prison/halfway house industry, most of the executives running most of the companies should be put behind bars. They don't simply cut corners to save money. Many good executives do that. They don't merely save money and time when doing background checks on employees, they do it constantly. They don't have their lobbyists pass on campaign contributions to politicians with more than the usual strings attached, they do it in spades.

When I worked for Allvest, Cornell's predecessor in Alaska private corrections, once I had been promoted to the executive level, I had to prove up. The company's starters were all Democrats. I was a Republican for a long time, and had gotten to know many prominent Alaska Republicans during the 1970s, while serving as Harbormaster for the Whittier Small Boat Harbor. Since none of the company's founders or top executives wanted to be seen at GOP fundraisers, I became the brown bag-bearing guy who would be happily greeted. Until I turned over the money - either a check or checks from St. John's Investments, or cold, hard cash. Then I'd be marginalized at the fundraiser, as I wasn't a party "activist." Some of these contributions were legal, but I've never doubted that some weren't.

I was continuing to prove up until, one day I simply refused to perform an illegal act for the company's president, Bill Weimer. He tried me a fw more times, but after my refusals, I was sidetracked away from the VP track, and into a dead-end internal inspector kind of role, until I left to get back into the music business after a 20-year hiatus.

I was hoping it would turn out that Frank Prewitt had gone to the FBI himself. Now, from reports of the trial of former lobbyist and legislator Tim Anderson, comes the information that Prewitt only began to co-operate with the FBI after he himself was implicated.

Sad. Am I glad I got out of that dirty business when I did? Yes! Should I have gotten out earlier? I'm not entirely sure, but I took the part of the job dealing with sensible rehabilitation of inmates - we called them "residents" while in the halfway house - very seriously, actually gaining great enjoyment from seeing people emerge from a period of difficulty and back into productive, sane life.

The Ted Stevens Warehouse of Moldy Stenography

2007-06-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

As the decades-old GOP machine in Alaska crumbles to the ground here, many of the most fascinating developments involve increasing questions about the ability of our Alaska press to deal thoroughly, honestly and competently with the relationship between business and our politicians. I’ve been watching this with growing interest since the first rumblings of an FBI probe into political corruption began to leak out late in the spring of 2006.

Well, actually, I’ve been watching the story develop since I first interviewed Sen. Ted Stevens for Cordova’s KLAM Radio back in the fall of 1973. At that time, Sen. Stevens was opposed to a concept our other senator – Mike Gravel – was promoting, the Law of the Sea Conference. Back in the 1970s, fleets of Soviet, Polish, East German and North Korean factory trawlers operated twelve miles off the Alaska coast. Gravel wanted a rational, UN-based worldwide solution to over-fishing.

Stevens wanted something different. At the time, according to my notes from 1973, his ideas seemed incoherent compared to Gravel’s. But, over the next 34 years I’ve been able to see how helpful his plan was, at least for his family.

Now, as in the case of so many Republicans nationwide, our congressmen seem to be caught up as much in their hubris as in their criminality. Nationwide, left-leaning blogs and progressive radio have followed these stories far better than have traditional media outlets. Blogs are doing a better job than even the progressive radio stations. This disparity is mostly structural. Blogs react as closely to real time as is currently possible. Newspapers, for example, can’t.

Outside the blogosphere, which can get overly self-referential, we have had a few courageous souls chronicling the lapses and possibly criminal activities of our political icons. The most important recent figure is, of course, Ray Metcalfe, who, long before Sarah Palin had discarded her political training wheels, was cycling circles around the Alaska print and broadcast media on the pervasiveness of political corruption here. By and large, Metcalfe was ignored by the print media and TV and vilified by right-wing hate radio.

Too often, credible journalists and opinion writers who showed not only a talent for describing the extent of corruption here, but attracted a following, have been dealt with peremptorily. Mike Doogan is the most well-known example. Where did Carrie Carrigan’s KFQD program go? Why won’t KSKA answer questions about the abrupt departure of Gilberto Sanchez soon after his community activism profile was heightened in other local media?

The shock of the most recent wave of Federal plea bargains and indictments of prominent GOP crooks seemed for a moment to put a little spine into The Anchorage Daily News, for instance. But their dropping of the Voice of the Times is being explained away by their editors as a coincidence. Many people were glad to see such recipients of wingnut welfare as Dennis Fradley and Paul Jenkins disappear into the obscurity they so richly deserve. Sadly, though, the solution to the empty space problem at the Daily News, as explained by editor Matt Zencey is to hire more hacks!

Zencey’s article in the Sunday May 27 edition of the Daily News, outlining the paper’s plans for the space formerly occupied by the Voice of the Times, announced a packet of mixed blessings for readers. Elise Patkotak is a favorite writer of mine. Many readers were hoping the Daily News would find a way to keep her viewpoints and opinions on their pages, and our hopes have been met.

Zencey’s characterizations of two writers in the new format beg further scrutiny. The Daily News will continue to carry Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. Krauthammer’s life story is one of ascendant personal courage, professional medical breakthroughs and descending journalistic integrity. Dr. Krauthammer was on a medical team that established “secondary mania” as a distinct malady from “bipolar disorder.” He has won a Pulitzer Prize for his opinion essays.

Zencey claims Krauthammer “casts a skeptical eye on the doings of the Democratic Congress.” While that is true, Congress has been “Democratic” for only five of the past 149 months. I’m not quite sure which articles before January, 1995 Zencey is remembering, but to my recollection, most of Dr. Krauthammer’s life before that period was going to school, practicing and researching medicine, and working for notable Democrats such as Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.

Krauthammer has been consistently wrong about the War in Iraq, dating back from at least mid-2002 to the present. He pushed dubious talking points about alleged links between al Qaeda and Saddam’s regime and about Iraq’s mythical nuclear arsenal harder and longer than anyone but Vice President Cheney. He characterized the invasion of Iraq as the “Three Week War, a revolution in world affairs.” Liberal journalist Matthew Yglesias wrote that "Krauthammer is very possibly the worst journalist working in America today, a relentlessly pernicious force, never right about anything, who feels his commentary should not be shackled by the small-minded bonds of accuracy or logic.”

Zencey characterizes KFQD talk show host Dan Fagan as a commentator who “loves a good argument.” Apparently, Zencey doesn’t spend much time listening to Fagan. Although this isn’t surprising, Zencey should know that Fagan routinely rants about unions, environmentalists and liberal politicians, characterizing many fairly mainstream activities and ideas as “Marxist-Leninist,” or “communist;” or when Dan wants to be nice, as “socialist.” He chastises liberals for not calling, but often when they do, he insults them.

I know how little Dan really “loves a good argument.” Last year, in the wake of ABC’s notoriously inaccurate “Path to 9-11,” Fagan erroneously claimed that in the aftermath of the Battle of Mogadishu, the subject of the movie “Blackhawk Down,” President Clinton had “cut and run” from Somalia. A caller disputed Fagan, saying that Clinton had wanted to stay the course, but the GOP-dominated US Congress had demanded a quick exit strategy. Fagan told the caller that he was wrong. I called, with a list of quotes by prominent Republicans demanding then that Clinton immediately withdraw US forces from Somalia. Fagan refused to allow me to read any of the short statements, hanging up on me in mid-sentence. Dan “cut and ran.”

On an earlier show Fagan had challenged a caller who asserted that during the Reagan administration, the US had actively supported Saddam’s chemical warfare programs. Fagan hung up on the guy, saying his claim was “nuts, just totally nuts!” When I called supporting the earlier caller, including the facts behind President Reagan’s veto of a 1984 Congressional Resolution condemning Saddam’s use of chemical weapons, Fagan hung up on me too, calling my claim “a wacko’s view,” after he had denied me a forum from which I might retort.

Fagan is also what some might term a homophobe. Most humorously, he related how bothered he was that one of his card-playing partners had seen the movie “Brokeback Mountain.” He kept on asking Sharon Leyhow “How can I even sit next to this guy after he’s seen that movie?” Sadly, Fagan was dead serious.

As with Charles Krauthammer, there are good things to say about Dan Fagan, but readers need to realize that both Krauthammer and Fagan have argued incessantly right up through the past few days that evidence of the abject failure of our president’s policies can and should be marshaled as evidence of the necessity of pursuing those failures endlessly.

The hiring of these two hacks is already so last month. As more information seeps out about Rep. Young and Sen. Stevens, the only established media interested in the glaringly obvious happen to be disreputable newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post. Not that Young has much more to say to the New York Times than he does to the Daily News or APRN or KTUU, but at least they got him to flip them off. Why is it that newspapers in Arkansas and Naples Florida and New York City can follow the most important local stories in Alaska history far better than we can?

The joke our Alaska media is becoming grows bigger by the day. While the Washington, DC-based web site TPM Muckraker is able to report on the egregious conduct of Sen. Stevens and Rep. Young on a daily basis and elicit comments from around Alaska, the USA and world on an hourly, if not minute-by-minute basis, our media continues to write puff pieces about both of these yet-to-be-indicted criminals as if nothing has happened. While the New York Times and Washington Post are able to haunt these crooks in the halls of congress and follow them on the stump, our Alaska reporters only appear to be showing up dutifully at the congressmen's pre-arranged photo ops and then dictate whatever the congressmen want.
My favorite very recent example is that at the same time the TPM crew is taking apart the absurd openness of these guys' criminality - I loved Josh Marshall’s layed-back "Ted Stevens' House Renovation for Dummies" piece Tuesday morning - the Anchorage Daily News can only come up with this incredibly lame puff piece:
http://www.adn.com/opinion/view/story/8947184p-8847185c.html
"[Whittier] Museum organizers apparently have a special interest in aviation and have a special surprise on hand for visitors: Two dozen photos from Sen. Ted Stevens' World War II years flying in Asia. The collection includes a charming photo of young Sen. Stevens, an Army Air Force officer, strumming a guitar."
Special surprise? Charming? Good friggin' grief! So I'm going to go down to Whittier to see a picture of St. Ted strumming a guitar sixty years ago? This was surely thought up in The Department of You Can't Make This Sh*t Up, where they have to work overtime, lately. How about getting Sen. Stevens to answer serious questions about what he's doing now, you hapless shills?
I wrote about this last year in regard to the paucity of in-depth coverage of Rep. Don Young:
http://www.insurgent49.com/munger_young.html
"This has been handled rather poorly, in most part, by Alaska media. Alaska editors and reporters need to begin connecting the dots very, very soon in a responsible and comprehensive way on the patterns of abuse of power by our sole representative in Congress. Should Young be re-elected and then indicted for his activities without a deeper coverage of his shortcomings by the Alaska press, Young’s indictment will also be an indictment of the Alaska media’s inability or unwillingness to fully do its job."
Words more and more true every day. Come on, Alaska media, start doing your job! At the rate things are going, especially in the Anchorage print media, within a couple of years, we'll be able to rename an empty Anchorage Daily News building "The Ted Stevens Warehouse of Moldy Stenography."

Imagine a Nano-orchestra.....

2007-06-26T10:19:00.002-07:00

Welcome to the Knik Philharmonic Orchestra! It is located in my mind and in my small studio in the basement of our house on Neklason Lake, between Palmer and Wasilla, Alaska. The name was created back in late 1990 or early 1991, soon after I returned to writing electronic music after leaving the medium back in late 1972. In those eighteen
years, the technology of electronic music had changed quite markedly. In the early 1970s, electronic music was created mostly through creating tape recordings of oscillating sound waves and other electronic distortions, or by editing tape recordings of sounds occurring in the natural world, or by combining these basic elements. Editing was done by re-recording from one tape to another, or by manually cutting pieces of reel-to-reel tape into snips and pasting them back together.

During the early 1970s - 1970 through 1972, for me - electronic music was becoming an increasingly important fixture as background music in such art as film scores. The most notable electronic film score from that period was Wendy Carlos' score to Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. The electronic music I composed during that period was much more modest, mostly two to five-minute experiments I could try out on the radio audience listening to my weekday morning program on KRAB-FM in Seattle.

When I returned to electronic music in 1990, the return was less an intentional move back to that medium than it was an auxiliary benefit from my creation of a computer-based studio for composition and notation of music to be performed by conventional acoustic musical instruments. I was one of the very early users of Finale, the first truly viable music notation program. I turned to Finale because while orchestrating a ten-minute composition by hand during the summer of 1989, I discovered my writing hand going numb after half an hour or so of scoring. This was the side effect of a crushing injury ten years earlier to my left hand during a marine salvage operation on Prince William Sound, which went awry.

When I bought Finale, along with the computer, MIDI controller and Proteus II sound module to go along with it, my whole approach to writing music changed, as it inevitably does for any composer using a similar setup. The Proteus II was the first digital sound module available to the mass music market that was primarily made up of digital samples of orchestral instruments. I tied those "voices" to the Finale program so that as I composed a string quartet, for instance, I could play back my work-in-progress to sound more than a little like what a human string quartet might.

But along with the orchestral sound samples, the Proteus II came with dozens of synthetic amalgamations. Sci-Fi movie kinds of sounds and special effects. Early on, I started using some of these sounds in improvised or notated electronic mixes. Some of my sculptor friends, most notably bronze sculptor Peter Bevis, requested electronic backgrounds from me to accompany gallery shows or multi-media presentations. Peter might be the one who came up with the term Knik Philharmonic around that time. Or me - I can't quite remember. In 1990-91, we lived about 20 miles from our present house, in an area known as Knik-Fairview Loop. Knik is an old settlement near where Alaska Natives had a village that took advantage of a mild micro-climate and nearby streams with large Sockeye, Coho and Chinook runs.

From 1991 through 1994, Peter Bevis and I co-operated in a series of presentations. We called three of the winter activity sets the Knik Philharmonic Winter Tours. They involved us in activist artistic projects having to do with environmental catastrophes or ecological degradation. More about what we did then in a future post.

But in 1995, Peter became sidetracked in a major project - saving the art deco ferry boat Kalakala from the boat's location at Gibson Cove on Kodiak Island. His work as a sculptor virtually ceased until after 1998, when he brought the vessel down from Kodiak to Elliot Bay, and then over to Lake Union. More about that, too, in a future post.

Peter Bevis and I both feel strongly that artists can make powerful statements about human events, including day-to-day political events which shape the lives of our families, communities, states, nations and this planet. I have felt uncomfortable with the notion that classically-oriented composers should write music that avoids disturbing the listeners for one reason or another. A fair percentage of my classically-oriented musical output has been what I term Protest Music. The combination of my political activism, protest music and communication with other artists and activists, is what the Knik Philharmonic is all about.