I was talking with a friend of mine many, many years ago when I lived in San Francisco and she was like,

dude, you should be really proud of what you guys accomplished, especially growing up in such an

isolated place. And I was like, yeah, you know what, you're right. You're absolutely right. It was,

it was like a moment in time that's never going to happen again like that. It's just like a creative

flash and then it's over. And then you got to, you got to move on because it's going to be something

else, right? Like somebody else has their time now, you know. That was Josh Medsker. And in the mid 90s

and early 2000s, he 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 Cities Alt Weekly, The Anchorage

Press, and for his own publication, noise, noise, noise. Articles, interviews, anything he could do

to help tell the story of punk in Alaska. The scene was so vibrant and the energy was so infectious

that he felt a responsibility to capture as much as he could. There were bands with names like

Skate Death, Psychedelic Skeletons, and Filipino haircut. There were bands interested in the

occult, bands interested in performance art, and bands interested in making genuine punk music.

There was even a band that lit themselves on fire. And they were all performing in venues and

eventually warehouses. But for it all to be sustainable, there needed to be the right mix of

culture bearers and promoters. Bands that created the music, venues that hosted shows, an alt-weekly

newspaper that promoted the shows, and a college radio station that played the music. It was a

mixture that sometimes worked out and sometimes didn't. When it worked out, the scene would flourish.

When it didn't, the scene would fade. Josh looks back on that time as some of the happiest

moments of his life. He remembers going into local music stores and buying local music. How

special it was to buy a tape and listen to a local band, knowing that these musicians were

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