Rich Baiocco

I’ve blogged about him a few times on here before, but damn, Les Blank just died. His films have lightning spirt in them, every weird and garlicky and gap-toothed one of them. 

Thanks for giving them to us Les. You’re a beauty !

Hey if you get a chance, check out Frontline tonight on PBS.  My friend Travis Rummel and his video company Felt Soul Media have footage from a documentary of theirs in a piece called Alaska Gold.  The documentary, and the PBS special, explore the fight going on in the Bristol Bay Region of Southwestern Alaska where two industries are colliding.  The Bay is the last great wild Sockeye Salmon fishery in the world, providing livery for an entire region of fisherman, but it is also home to a $500 Billion mineral deposit—Pebble Mine—of Gold, Copper, and Molybdenum, whose wealth two foreign companies have proposed to extract at the expense of ruining the precious ecosystem in the Bay.  Politicians will soon decide. 

Travis and Felt Soul make great fishing documentaries like Eastern Promises and their latest, DamNation, which examines the shifting mindset in river sustainability away from dams. Check them out. And here’s the movie poster for DamNation: an actual photo taken in October 2011 of the one-time illegally dammed Elwha River in Washington’s Olympic National Park, which is now GONE. And rightfully so. Let the Rivers flow…