09/22/2026
These are two articles in the San Francisco Examiner from 1962 about a visit to Alaska for a performance of new music at the Anchorage Arts Festival. One of the performers was one of my favorites, Vladimir Ussachevsky. We have inherited a rare recording of the performance here at the Alaska Archives.
Kenneth Rexroth
The New Frontier in Alaska
�For the past week I have been up to Alaska, taking part in the Anchorage Arts Festival. I’ve never had a better time, or met more hospitable people. I hadn’t been there many hours before it occurred to me that the two contradictory forms of the community of the future are represented at opposite ends of the country — Los Angeles and Anchorage.
I never fly over that unbelievable sea of light, that picks up east of San Berdoo and continues west without interruption into the Pacific at Malibu, without thinking what Katherine Mansfield said when she first read James Joyce’s Ulysses: “This is the future, and I’m glad I’ve got tuberculosis.”
Under me the little old ladies in tennis shoes in their vine-covered cottages write poison pen letters about liberal clergymen, peroxided mamas push their peroxided Lolitas into the warm swimming pools and flaccid arms of tenth-string TV personalities (quoting the appropriate texts from Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelations the while), the PTA riots around the school yard, burning the UN flag, the anti-fluoridation forces storm the Health Department laboratories, cinema stars and cinema moguls are managed by Jungians and astrologers, and the harried intellectuals are under the impression that Socialist Realism is the latest thing from Paris, France.
This is certainly one form of the future — in the words of the elder Huxley describing the signs of the death of a species, “overspecialization, proliferation, gigantism, maximum heterogeneity.” That man was sure right, even though he was talking about big lizards and not Homo Babyloniensis.
On the other hand, I came in through a clear sky, over another unbelievable sea, but this time of thousands of square miles of snow and ice-covered mountains, like a dozen Himalaya ranges, circled a glacial trough of a valley, half drowned and bisected by a meandering marshy river — just like a geology textbook — and put down in a mushroom town, exactly like a scattered tract development lost in a gravel pit and spruce bog. The works of God were awe-inspiring enough for anybody’s taste, but the works of man didn’t seem very prepossessing.
What man was doing with himself was another matter. It wasn’t just the Festival. There are culture-hungry social matrons in provincial towns all over the world and always have been. “Ah! Moscow!” say Chekhov’s three sisters, lost in the boondocks.
Here in the real boondocks, in the midst of the tundra, under a midsummer sky that never grows dark, they aren’t very culture hungry, for the simple reason that they have provided themselves with surprisingly unprovincial nourishment.
It’s not just that they gave Ussachevsky three television programs to explain the technical intricacies of electronic music. It’s not just that I read to a full auditorium and an enthusiastic and informed audience. It’s not just that people gave me pots like those that win prizes at San Francisco art shows, but made of glacier mud.
(I also was given a marvelously taxidermed wolverine skin which now lies at the foot of my daughters’ bed. Assuming they really will grow up to be ballerinas, it’s the first step towards polar bear and tiger hides before an intimate fire.)
It’s not just that large attentive audiences seemed really to dig pretty demanding chamber music. It’s not just that the art shows had a lot of pictures by a local girl who is one of the better painters of the New Figurative School — and whose landscapes were alive with the light and mood of the subarctic. It was something of which phenomena like these were only reflections and symptoms — a new urbanity on a new kind of frontier.
California, north or south — let’s admit it — is not much of a frontier any more. In fact it is a kind of anti-frontier, the dead end, the jumping off place. Anchorage is only incidentally and geographically, or rather ecologically, a frontier of the old type. That is, it is set amidst glaciers and wolverines and dwarfed spruce and birch.
Geographically it is actually a new metropolis, a crossroads for the polar air routes of all the world, which scatter down from it all over the globe like a bursting rocket. But it is a city, grown up over night, on a kind of electronic frontier. Regardless of the military technology, civilized life of any sort would be pretty difficult without the most recent achievements of science.
This means that the true frontier in Anchorage is in the minds of its inhabitants. They are the exact opposite of the lost souls that throw themselves off Golden Gate Bridge or lie in Malibu on the couches of the Jungians. I don’t believe I have ever met such a large proportion of handsome and enormously competent women (proportionate, let me add, to very male males). It’s easy to see why — the place has its own processes of elimination. The spoiled darlings and the mom-ridden sad young men get out of the plane, bust out a-bawlin’ and go home as soon as possible.
[June 24, 1962]
The Wealth of Alaska
�In case you haven’t been keeping up with my activities, last week I was up in Anchorage, Alaska, for their Music and Arts Festival.
The arts and music were expert and civilized, the people were wonderfully hospitable. In addition they were certainly every bit as urbane as people anywhere else. Setting, costumes, décor, dialogue — at the parties I went to I couldn’t tell but what I was in Presidio Terrace except by looking out the window at the snow-covered mountains and the long, dark blue drowned-looking sweep of Cook Inlet with the midnight sun over it.
There was one difference, though, and it was most important. The rooms were smaller, flimsier, cheaper by far in every way. But the homes cost a great deal more money.
I was taken for a drive along the town’s fashionable street. It was lined with houses indistinguishable from those in a minimum-cost development around San Francisco.
“Here is So-and-So’s house, it cost $95,000. Here is So-and-So’s, it cost $125,000.” And so on through all the So-and-So’s of the grand rich of Alaska. The best of them in the Old Country would have brought around $32,000 at the very most.
Then we rounded a bend and saw before us a Benedict Canyon job in oiled teak, with flying decks and carports and porte-cochères and swimming pool and clay court and everything running hot and cold mutton-chop-whiskered butlers. It looked like the palace of the Grand Duke of the Arctic.
“Gee whiz,” said I, “whose place is that?”
“That,” said my host, “is the home of the contractor who built the other houses.”
That’s Alaska. I was through Anchorage about 36 years ago and I don’t even remember it. At the beginning of World War II it was a very small town. Now 100,000 people live in the city and its environs. Prices aren’t what they were in the days of Jack London, but they are still pretty steep. Basic capital investment comes high, but it pays off enormously.
For all its youth, Alaska was an economic colony. Fishing, mining, a colonial extractive economy — Alaska’s wealth was taken out and reinvested in the States, and after the early entrepreneurs had made their pile, they retired to Seattle or Pasadena and put their fast bucks in blue chips and safe real estate.
It would be possible to go down the list of what a new country needs as basic equipment — aggregate plants, lumber mills (in the middle of a forest, it’s cheaper to import lumber from Japan), machine shops, small foundries, a chip-board industry, technical services, repairs and so on — something like the master plans for Persia or Afghanistan that were never put into effect. Invest your money cautiously, without over-extension, and make a lot more in the long run than all but a few people ever made out of the Gold Rush.
Meanwhile, the armed forces pour in money and it still pours right back out, except for what sticks fast in the $125,000 sheet-rock mansions.
[June 27, 1962]
