Crude Conversations

Nyla Innuksuk is an Indigenous director from Canada and she recently released Slash/Back, a horror / sci-fi movie about a group of Inuit girls who save their remote arctic community from an alien invasion. She says that the horror genre has always been a big part of her life. Her mom — being a fan as well — introduced it to her, actually. One day when Nyla and a friend were having a sleep over, he...

In this episode, Cody talks to pianist Michele McLaughlin. She says that she’s always been musical. When she was in kindergarten, she learned to play the piano. Whatever songs they were singing in class, she would go home and learn them by ear and then play them for her class, almost as a form of show and tell. She remembers Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Mary Had a Little Lamb. Then, when she wa...

Mossy Kilcher is a homesteader, a musician and an ornithologist. When she was young, she was afraid of nature. It was just so big and there were so many ways to die. But the more time she spent outdoors, the better she understood it. Making music and recording bird songs helped. She realized that it wasn’t about taming the wilderness or dominating nature — like her father believed — it was about l...

In the mid-90s and early 2000s, Josh Medsker documented the Alaska punk scene. He started out as a fan, attending as many shows as he could, and then he began documenting the scene. For about three years, he wrote for the University of Alaska Anchorage student paper, “The Northern Light,” the city’s alt-weekly, “The Anchorage Press,” and for his own publication, “Noise, Noise, Noise.” Articles, in...

Crystal Worl is fresh off of two big projects. A mural in downtown Anchorage and a commission for Google. The mural depicts and applies traditional Alaska Native traditions and symbols — the formline art of the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian, for example. It’s 120-feet long, the largest thing she’s ever designed. The Google skin, titled “Primary Ravens,” depicts ravens, which represent the Creator a...

In this one, Cody talks to professional snowboarder Sammy Luebke. Snowboarding has been part of Sammy’s life for 25 years. He grew up in it. His first board was a 111 Burton Air — it was about 3 and a half feet tall — and he rode it at Alyeska, when he and his family lived in Girdwood, Alaska in an A-frame nicknamed Twin Peaks. There, at Alyeska, was where he laid the groundwork for the rider he w...

In this one, Cody talks to big mountain snowboarder Ashley Call. As a kid, he was familiar with his home mountain, Eaglecrest, because he’d be there pretty much every day from 6:30 in the morning to 6:30 in the evening. For over 20 years, his dad was the director of ski patrol. So, while he helped ready the mountain for the day, Ashley ran around the lodge and caused trouble. Until the mountain op...

Priscilla Hensley is a writer and a documentarian. Before she started working on documentaries, her job history was varied — she had worked in communications and, having made a few short films herself, had some prior knowledge of filmmaking. There was also a period of time when she considered herself a poet. All these jobs have helped her to become a jack-of-all-trades. Her time in communications...

Melissa Chimera creates mixed media paintings and installations that are research-based investigations into species extinction, globalization and human migration. Her portraits are fictional, but they’re based in empirical fact. She combs through the public record of peoples’ lives, collecting information to better understand them beyond what DNA can tell us. She includes elements and details of w...

In this one, Cody talks to Pete Iversen. Pete’s a dentist now, but back in the late 1990s, he was on his way to becoming a top name in snowboarding — he was winning heavy competitions and he was filming with big snowboard videos and local ones too. He had shots in a Mack Dawg video and a Straight Jacket Films video and parts in the legendary JB Deuce videos. Things were looking pretty good, until...

In this one, Cody talks to Brock Lindow of 36 Crazyfists. For 25 years, he was the vocalist of the band and, along with his bandmates, he wrote albums and performed songs, toured, connected with people at shows on a nightly basis and then repeated the cycle. He was 18 years old when 36 started — a founding member — and at that age, young bravado and vitality helped them be, as Brock puts it, a ban...

In this one, Cody talks to Tlingit artist James Johnson. Before he got to the level he’s at now, James taught himself the fundamentals of the Tlingit artform — he taught himself how to draw, how to carve, how to sharpen his knives. He taught himself the fundamentals of formline. His dad taught him the importance of traditional knowledge — that when you create a piece, you create it for your clan....

In this one, Cody talks to dog musher Aliy Zirkle. She’s always felt a strong connection to animals, dogs in particular. She tells this story about how when she was a kid and lived in Puerto Rico, there were a couple of stray dogs that pulled her around on a skateboard. Mushing was in her blood, even then.   For 30 years, mushing has been everything to Aliy. It’s been her passion and her career. A...

In this one, Cody talks to videographer Gary Milton. He describes himself as a snowboarder, through and through — one who, every year, has a best day ever. A day spent with old friends and new friends and riding powder. It’s reminiscent of his upbringing in Palmer, Alaska, where he and his buddies would explore the surrounding woods and mountains. They’d snowboard 16 mile and, for their age and th...

Rob Kinneen has been an ambassador for Alaskan cuisine through his guest chef appearances, speaking engagements, cooking demonstrations and private caterings. His work has revolutionized how people see and understand the state’s traditional foods. His understanding of traditional foods goes back to growing up in Petersburg, Alaska, where he remembers clamming with his uncles, fishing with his dad...

In this one, Cody talks to Matt Eastman, an entrepreneur and a businessman. Over the years, he’s founded a number of companies — an inflatable party rental business called Tons of Fun Entertainment, a hockey blade protector business called Hockey Wraparound , and a sunglasses business called Teamclix . But before all that, he was the most business-minded manager at the Dimond Center Boarderline, a...

In this one, Cody talks to journalist and author Kim Rich. She wrote the classic memoir “ Johnny’s Girl ,” it’s about her tumultuous upbringing in Anchorage’s underworld. Back in the 1960s, her dad, Johnny, worked Anchorage’s nightlife — gambling houses, prostitution and get-rich-quick schemes. Her mom, Ginger, was an exotic dancer. She had mental health issues and spent years of her life in a num...

Jimmy Riordan is a multidisciplinary artist and educator who’s currently in-residence at the Anchorage Museum, digitizing and archiving the work of Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta musicians, as well as all the other Alaska music he’s collected over the years. He spends a lot of time in thrift stores and going through junk bins and scouring the internet — anywhere old records might exist. When he first start...

In this one, Cody talks to Andre Spinelli, better known as Dre. In snowboarding, Dre is known for going big — off jumps, off cornices, even a lot of the handrails he used to hit were big. It’s probably because he started riding with old school Alaskan heavies like Dan Coffey and Kovi Linden. They might not have been as technical as other riders, but they were always charging down the mountain and...

Nyabony Gat says that her immigrant story started 22 years ago. In 1992, when her parents and older siblings fled from South Sudan and found refuge in Ethiopia — the Second Sudanese civil war was going on between the central Sudanese government and the Sudan People's Liberation Army. It was a long and bloody war and it caused four million people to be displaced.  Nyabony doesn’t remember much from...

When interdisciplinary artist LaMont Hamilton was young, he drew portraits of figures that he admired — Jimmy Hendrix, Che Guevara, Malcom X. He called it “scribble art,” a term he invented to describe abstract art that, the longer you look at it, the more it reveals. Then, as he got older, he became interested in photography. But he says that his first love, the one that he considers to be the fo...

Charles J. Tice is a visual and literary creative in Anchorage, Alaska with an emphasis on photography and gonzo journalism. He's currently in-residence, at the Anchorage Museum, working on a project called Artist Proof #6. It’s a book that’ll feature 100 photographs of strangers, assisted by a narrative. The writing is important, he says, probably the most important part of the project. So, he wo...

In this one, Cody talks with Elishaba Doerksen, the oldest daughter of fundamentalist Robert Hale, better known as Papa Pilgrim. In 2000, the Hale family — consisting of Papa Pilgrim, his wife and 15 kids — moved from the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico to a homestead in the Wrangell–St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska. It's the largest area managed by the National Park Service, with over...

Photographer Young Kim says that it’s weird to live in a place that’s so big and so busy that people aren’t checking up on each other. He prefers smaller communities where everyone knows each other. His longing to be part of something tight-knit might come from his early childhood, when he and his family lived in Sand Point, a town of about 600 located along the Aleutian Islands.  Young’s sense of...

In this episode, Cody talks with battle rapper Sydney Eubanks, better known as Phonetic. He’s been in the Alaska hip-hop scene now for over 20 years. He started making music in Sitka and then doing live shows in Juneau. He says that being from Sitka — a small town in Alaska — he understood that battle rapping was the fastest way to build his name and get respect. So, in 2002, he went to Seattle to...