Anyone who has been down the Seward Highway lately will tell you that the hooligan crowd is back. You'll see many slovenly clad fisherman bearing buckets off the highway, seeking the hooligans that run this time of year, small herring-like fish resembling smelt. In Anchorage, dipnetting for hooligans in the rivers starts in May and serves to whet the fisherman's appetite for the real fish yet to come.
Hooligan fishing requires a much smaller dipnet (with maybe a two-foot diameter) a pair of waders, some patience, and a love for oily fish. In a town where everyone can get fresh wild Alaskan salmon without much trouble, the hooligans lie pretty low in the hierarchy of fish. Most people will scrunch up their noses at the sound of "hooligans" and snootily say, "Aren't they really oily?" But if you press these skeptics further, they will admit that they've never fished for them or eaten them. For the hooligan, its reputation precedes itself. As someone who has fished for them and eaten them, I'll say this. They are oily, which translates into being soft-fleshed. For this reason, I am not a big fan of the hooligan. They also do not have a very characteristic flavor. Nonetheless, Hooligan dipnetting is popular among the Alaska Natives here as well as non-white immigrant population. In fact, dipnetting for hooligans is one of the few activities in Alaska in which a Chinese person doesn't feel like a minority. I've met Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, South Americans -- all kinds of people harvesting buckets of hooligans.
For me, the appeal of hooligan dipnetting is the thrill of getting multiple fish in one dip. Try this with salmon and you'll be floating down a river to your demise. When the river is hot with hooligans, it is not unheard of to have six or even seven hooligans squirming in your net at once. At the end of the day, you can sling your net over your shoulder with a sizeable bounty of miniature fish and feel like a real bad-ass fisherman of tiny tiny fish. Hooligan dipnetting is also a great activity for couples. It is customary to have a hooligan "wife" or "bitch" depending on your relationship with your partner. One person stands in the river dipnetting, and when the net catches something, he throws the fish to said hooligan "wife" or "bitch" who stores it in a cooler or bucket of cold water. Without the hooligan wife/bitch, the fisherman would have to wade out of the river every time just to deposit a single fish, so he/she/whatever is really instrumental to the process. Behind every good hooligan fisherman is literally a hooligan wife or bitch. There's nothing sadder than fishing for hooligan by yourself.
Before you run off the side of the highway with your hooligan net, a couple of warnings about hooligan dipnetting. First, it's reserved only for residents, so tourists have no choice but to stop on the highway and gawk. Second, the river can be cold - wear socks, maybe long underwear under your waders and certainly gloves. Third, the fish are frisky. It is not uncommon for the hooligans to give one last reproductive spray as you try to drop them into the bucket. So don't take it personally.
The best thing about warming up with hooligans is that it means the salmon will be coming soon.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Gyrating With Gordon
Many months ago when I first started this blog and referred to the young kids with fingers poised on the dials of their iPods, I considered them to be creatures who lived in a different world not my own. Now I have become such a creature. This morning, I found myself using my own index finger to swirl the smooth surface of an iPod in order to rock out to J. Timberlake's Sexy Back in my basement.
I know little about this iPod except that it is black and shiny and that its shiny black surface picks up fingerprints very easily (a passive-aggressive warning to anyone wanting to steal it!). It has some permutation of gigabytes for memory and may have lots of interesting features, but my familiarity begins and ends with knowing how to plug in earphones and rock out.
Previously, I was a user of the iShuffle, which I think was probably not very cool among the young kids with the low-riding jeans despite the iShuffle's convenient small gum-stick size. I also may have mitigated what little cool factor it had by 'snoopifying' the device (and by that, I mean sticking a small Snoopy sticker on it to mark it as my own). The iShuffle, despite its moniker, seemed not to shuffle very much. I often experienced weird long stretches of Madonna or Michael Jackson (my iShuffle seemed to have an eerie proclivity for these artists) and then random strings of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. (A word of advice: while nobody plays the Goldberg Variations like Glenn Gould, putting him on an i-Device is like making David Bowie have lunch with my mother. The universe does not agree with such things.)
But those shuffling days are now over. I now use an I-POD. Not wanting to make party guests suffer through my Snoopy i-Shuffle's personal opinion of what kind of dance music should be playing, I loaded 172 songs onto the iPod for an evening of play. But in the end, our party guests ended up suffering through my personal opinion of what kind of dance music should be playing. Although we danced until 5am, the gang probably heard the same 10-12 songs. So much for diversity in music. Still, the high-quality color screen of the iPod made it very easy to select these same 10-12 songs over and over again. Plugged into a set of very large vintage speakers in an unfinished basement, this iPod was magical. We named it Gordon.
It was so magical that I spent many days after the party recreating the experience. I've spent many morning rocking out in the basement with Gordon providing the tunes and the speakers filling up the basement with delicious sound. This went on for two weeks until the speakers were abruptly repossessed by the friend who had loaned them to us. Not that I should have expected that the speakers were mine to keep simply because I DESPERATELY LOVED them.
Since those speakers were tragically ripped out of my life, I had not returned to the basement until this morning. Rocking out had become my morning workout, and it seemed ill-advised to just mope and get fat. I found Gordon's white factory earplugs, put on my hoochie-mama jeans and stuck him in the rear pocket of my jeans.
It was then that I realized life can go on without speakers. With Gordon plugged close into me, I suddenly gained great insight - for example, I finally understood what Beyonce and Shakira have been trying to say to each other in Beautiful Liar. Although I've danced to that song a number of times, up until now, I had been dancing to breathless, albeit sexy, gibberish.
Dancing with an iPod plugged in also means I become the vintage speaker you can buy at a garage sale; the music seemingly flows from within and then out of me. Like my mother, who is someone who will vibrate like a weird doll whenever Elvis is playing, I am someone whose dance is closely tuned into what I'm hearing. With Gordon plugged straight into me, I've cut out the middle man.
There are a few bugs to work out, however. Gordon is big enough that I don't want to hold him in my hands when I dance, but the rear pocket of my hoochie-mama jeans is apparently not the best place for Gordon either. For one thing, there's not a whole lot of room there, so every time I gyrate or spin, the friction from my butt cheek apparently spins Gordon's dial, making him get louder and louder. While exciting, it could prove dangerous for my ears.
But otherwise, there's nothing like rocking out "silently" at least vis-a-vis other people. Gordon and I can get lost in our own world, our own sound space. Whoever designed the iPod knew what he was doing. Gordon is sleek, powerful, and his white cordage is a clever marketing tool for branding. For a while, I used black earphones specifically to avoid telling the world that I was listening to my iShuffle. With Gordon, though, I somehow don't care. And I confess I even like the look of his factory white cord twisting out of my pants.
I suppose I've fallen victim to those iPod billboards depicting the bright white iPod accessories grooving against the hip black silhouettes. The whole get-up makes it possible for anyone, even someone with no musical skills, no rhythm, and even no battery power left, to at least look really cool.
Even with a Snoopy sticker.
I know little about this iPod except that it is black and shiny and that its shiny black surface picks up fingerprints very easily (a passive-aggressive warning to anyone wanting to steal it!). It has some permutation of gigabytes for memory and may have lots of interesting features, but my familiarity begins and ends with knowing how to plug in earphones and rock out.
Previously, I was a user of the iShuffle, which I think was probably not very cool among the young kids with the low-riding jeans despite the iShuffle's convenient small gum-stick size. I also may have mitigated what little cool factor it had by 'snoopifying' the device (and by that, I mean sticking a small Snoopy sticker on it to mark it as my own). The iShuffle, despite its moniker, seemed not to shuffle very much. I often experienced weird long stretches of Madonna or Michael Jackson (my iShuffle seemed to have an eerie proclivity for these artists) and then random strings of Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. (A word of advice: while nobody plays the Goldberg Variations like Glenn Gould, putting him on an i-Device is like making David Bowie have lunch with my mother. The universe does not agree with such things.)
But those shuffling days are now over. I now use an I-POD. Not wanting to make party guests suffer through my Snoopy i-Shuffle's personal opinion of what kind of dance music should be playing, I loaded 172 songs onto the iPod for an evening of play. But in the end, our party guests ended up suffering through my personal opinion of what kind of dance music should be playing. Although we danced until 5am, the gang probably heard the same 10-12 songs. So much for diversity in music. Still, the high-quality color screen of the iPod made it very easy to select these same 10-12 songs over and over again. Plugged into a set of very large vintage speakers in an unfinished basement, this iPod was magical. We named it Gordon.
It was so magical that I spent many days after the party recreating the experience. I've spent many morning rocking out in the basement with Gordon providing the tunes and the speakers filling up the basement with delicious sound. This went on for two weeks until the speakers were abruptly repossessed by the friend who had loaned them to us. Not that I should have expected that the speakers were mine to keep simply because I DESPERATELY LOVED them.
Since those speakers were tragically ripped out of my life, I had not returned to the basement until this morning. Rocking out had become my morning workout, and it seemed ill-advised to just mope and get fat. I found Gordon's white factory earplugs, put on my hoochie-mama jeans and stuck him in the rear pocket of my jeans.
It was then that I realized life can go on without speakers. With Gordon plugged close into me, I suddenly gained great insight - for example, I finally understood what Beyonce and Shakira have been trying to say to each other in Beautiful Liar. Although I've danced to that song a number of times, up until now, I had been dancing to breathless, albeit sexy, gibberish.
Dancing with an iPod plugged in also means I become the vintage speaker you can buy at a garage sale; the music seemingly flows from within and then out of me. Like my mother, who is someone who will vibrate like a weird doll whenever Elvis is playing, I am someone whose dance is closely tuned into what I'm hearing. With Gordon plugged straight into me, I've cut out the middle man.
There are a few bugs to work out, however. Gordon is big enough that I don't want to hold him in my hands when I dance, but the rear pocket of my hoochie-mama jeans is apparently not the best place for Gordon either. For one thing, there's not a whole lot of room there, so every time I gyrate or spin, the friction from my butt cheek apparently spins Gordon's dial, making him get louder and louder. While exciting, it could prove dangerous for my ears.
But otherwise, there's nothing like rocking out "silently" at least vis-a-vis other people. Gordon and I can get lost in our own world, our own sound space. Whoever designed the iPod knew what he was doing. Gordon is sleek, powerful, and his white cordage is a clever marketing tool for branding. For a while, I used black earphones specifically to avoid telling the world that I was listening to my iShuffle. With Gordon, though, I somehow don't care. And I confess I even like the look of his factory white cord twisting out of my pants.
I suppose I've fallen victim to those iPod billboards depicting the bright white iPod accessories grooving against the hip black silhouettes. The whole get-up makes it possible for anyone, even someone with no musical skills, no rhythm, and even no battery power left, to at least look really cool.
Even with a Snoopy sticker.
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