Crude Conversations

Charis Gullickson is the Curator and Public Sector PHD Student in Art History at the Arctic University of Norway. Charis has a mantra, and that is: museums are not neutral. They’re institutions of culture and agents of change. This is a relatively new concept because, historically, museums have been repositories of antiquities, often displaying artifacts with problematic pasts. This is an issue be...

In this one, Cody talks with Nick Perata about creating and working at King of the Hill, a legendary snowboard competition held in Thompson Pass back in the 1990s. Perata talks about what it was like being the director and event promoter and how the event came to be. Before King of the Hill, he was a professional snowboarder, pushing the nascent sport into new areas of discipline and filming for t...

I this episode of GLOSS, or the Gorgeous Ladies of Shred and Ski—an ongoing series between Crude and Blower Media —I talk with Christina Burtner, better known as Pika, a long-time artist, photographer and graphic designer in the snowboard industry. Pika grew up watching and studying snowboard videos with the technical eye of an auteur. At 14, she started renting snowboard videos from Fairhaven Bik...

In this one, Cody talks with motivational speaker and celebrity interviewer Preston Pollard. Preston grew up skateboarding in Anchorage, Alaska, and aided by the unwavering optimism he learned from family and loved ones, he pursued it in the same way he pursues everything in his life—with curiosity and passion. Talk to him and he’ll tell you that he’s not great at a lot of things—including skatebo...

In this episode, Cody has a conversation with Alice Glenn, the host of Coffee & Quaq, a podcast that explores Native life in urban Alaska. If you live in Alaska, then you're aware of racism toward Alaska Native people. It can be casual or it can be abrasive. Either way, it's detrimental to an entire group of people who have lived in Alaska for thousands of years. Long before the Russians or the Eu...

In this one, I talk to Dan Coffey about his experience at King of the Hill. Coffey’s experience and recollection of King of the Hill is unique, in that he was just a teenager when he went. He was a senior in high school when he first competed in the event. He says it was surreal, he was up there in the Chugach Mountains, competing with and riding the same lines as many of the snowboarders he looke...

In this episode, Cody has a conversation with longtime Alaska beer columnist Jim Roberts, better known as Dr. Fermento. Jim's been writing about and involved in the Alaska craft beer scene for over two decades. Back then, there were only about eight breweries in Alaska, today there are over forty. In an article he wrote for Crude in 2018, he called Alaska "the Beer Frontier." Cody and Jim talk abo...

In this first episode in an ongoing series between Crude and Blower Media—where I’ll be talking with influential women in snowboarding—I talk to Brooke Geery, a longtime snowboard journalist and publisher of snowboard media. In 1997, Brooke started an online snowboard publication called YoBeat. It began on an AOL message board with 2 megabytes of free space and grew into an internationally recogni...

In this episode of Chatter Marks, Cody talks with four artists and musicians about their work on the Anchorage Museum’s new exhibition titled Listen Up: Northern Soundscapes . The exhibition explores and considers northern soundscapes to better understand humans’ relationship with, understanding of and impact on the natural world.  A soundscape is made up of all the sounds of a given environment....

In this conversation, Cody talks with King of the Hill competitors Julie Zell and Steve Klassen. King of the Hill was a legendary snowboard competition held in Thompson Pass back in the 1990s that hosted a number of different perspectives. There were the partiers, the general participants and the competitors. Julie and Steve were competitors. They were the ones who got up early and made conscious...

Rejoy Armamento says that she’s always been interested in art, ever since she was a kid, but that it took her a while to reconnect with it in a serious way as an adult. As she got older, her attraction and affinity for it was stifled by feelings of ambivalence about whether being an artist was a realistic occupation. That was until she went to college in San Francisco, which she describes as a for...

In this episode, Cody has a conversation with Alaskan author Don Rearden. Don attributes being an author to his experiences and upbringing in rural Alaska. When he was  a kid, he and his family moved to a number of small communities in Southwest Alaska. There, he dealt with the loss of friends to suicide, drug and alcohol abuse and going missing. As a youth and as an adult, he made sense of this r...

When Meda DeWitt was in her early 20s, she began her journey as a traditional healer—she was pursuing a degree in nursing when she says that Spirit had other plans for her. She was having health events that couldn’t be explained by western medicine, so she sought and found answers in holistic medicine. She says that people have a tendency to think of traditional healing as antiquated or obsolete....

Ash Adams' work tends to focus on people and stories about humanity, and elevating the voices and experiences that have historically been underrepresented. In her work, this includes actively dismantling stereotypes by highlighting Indigenous voices and advocating for gender equity. She says that one role of photojournalism is to show what inequity feels like so that others may understand. And tha...

In this episode, Cody has a conversation with radio host and comedian Matt Collins. Matt got his start in radio at 17 years old at 87.7 The End in Anchorage. He was the overnight jockey and intern there, learning the ropes and getting used to being on-air. From there he went on to work as a producer and board op at 100.5 The Fox. But then after the Bob and Mark Show moved from The Fox to 106.5 KWH...

In this episode, Cody has a conversation with Anchorage Assembly member and Anchorage mayoral candidate Forrest Dunbar. Forrest’s introduction to local politics came in 2002, right after he graduated high school, when he interned for Frank Murkowski—who, at the time, was a United States Senator from Alaska. Before becoming a member of the Alaska Assembly, he was the Vice President of the Scenic Fo...

Jeroen Toirkens is a documentary photographer based out of The Hague in The Netherlands. He mainly works on long-term projects that can take years to complete. His most recent project, Borealis, took six years to complete. It’s a book that documents the Boreal Forest and the people who live in it. To accurately tell the story of the Boreal Forest—which is the largest land-based vegetation zone and...

In this episode, Cody has a conversation with Jerremy Santacrose, who’s also known by his rap alias, AKream, from back in the Arctic Flow days. Arctic Flow was an Alaskan rap group that started in 1999, and went on to influence and define what authentic Alaskan rap should sound like. The group consisted of Jerremy, Josh Boots, Soiled Seed, Nauseous and Alkota—four rappers and a beatmaker. Jerremy...

This week, Crude will be revisiting the top 5 most popular episodes of 2020. Number 1 on this list is Long Live Larson, where family and friends share some of their favorite memories of professional snowboarder Chris Larson. In April 2020, Larson took his own life. Without speculating on reasons why he did it, this episode focuses on the life of Larson.   If you didn’t know Larson, then the best w...

This week, Crude will be revisiting the top 5 most popular episodes of 2020. Number 2 on this list is with Joe Rambur, where we look at addiction through the perspective of a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. Joe took his first drink of alcohol at 13. Although his first experience getting high on opiates was at 14, it wasn't until adulthood that he became addicted. He smoked heroin for 12 year...

This week, Crude will be revisiting the top 5 most popular episodes of 2020. Number 3 on this list is with John Stallone. John comes from a military family—his grandfather served in World War II, and his dad and his uncle served in Vietnam—so enlisting in the military was a no-brainer for him. He joined the US Air Force at 18. From 1998 to 2002, he served as a security forces member and was deploy...

This week, Crude will be revisiting the top 5 most popular episodes of 2020. Number 4 on the list is with wildland firefighter Micah Booze. Booze has been a firefighter for over 15 years, five of which have been spent in Alaska. Fighting wildland fires in Alaska, he says, involves more than just putting water on the hot stuff. It involves strategic thinking.

This week, Crude will be revisiting the top 5 most popular episodes of 2020. Number 5 on the list is with Mike Ward, the co-owner of The Pioneer Bar. The Pioneer Bar, better known as Pio, is a classic Alaskan bar located in downtown Anchorage. It’s been around since the 1950s, before Alaska became a state. Back then, it was a working class bar with a regular crowd of blue collar workers and barfli...

Francesca DuBrock is the Chief Curator at the Anchorage Museum, and she recently finished putting the finishing touches on Extra Tough: Women of the North, an exhibit dedicated to exploring how women have shaped Alaska and the circumpolar north. The exhibit was a massive undertaking, it took over 9 months to complete and now occupies the entire third floor of the Museum, which is about 7,500 squar...

Thomas Chung says that he’s always been interested in art, even as a child, but that as he got older it became a means of self-preservation. His upbringing was marked by racism and homophobia, and art allowed him to express the emotions he didn’t consciously understand at the time. Those emotions, he would later realize, focused on cultural awareness and compassion, and would come to define much o...