Levi Johnston: Too busy to run for mayor in Alaska (AP)

JUNEAU, Alaska – Levi Johnston won't be mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, anytime soon.

Johnston, who toyed with running as part of a reality show, isn't an official candidate for the Oct. 4 election. His attorney, Rex Butler, says Johnston is too busy to run. Butler declined to give specifics but says Johnston has a book coming out next month and plans a tour.

Johnston was thrust into the national spotlight in 2008, when Sarah Palin was running for vice president. Johnston was the boyfriend of Palin's daughter Bristol, who was pregnant at the time with the couple's child.

The couple has since split.

Johnston went on to pose partially nude for Playgirl, and has said his book will set the record straight about the Palin family, with whom he's had a rocky relationship.

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Portugal. The Man: From Alaska to rock stardom (AP)

By CHRIS TALBOTT, AP Entertainment Writer Chris Talbott, Ap Entertainment Writer – Fri Aug 5, 10:43 am ET

NASHVILLE, Tenn. – John Gourley, lead singer of Portugal. The Man, has one heck of a back story.

He grew up in Alaska, the son of adventurous homesteaders and Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race veterans, rising before dawn to feed his family's dog team. At times, he went to school with just a handful of classmates and lived a lifestyle that in no way prepared him for the rest of the world.

"It's pretty bizarre, right — that a band actually came out of there?" Gourley said. "Being born and raised there you really, really take it for granted. People who live in New York City really take it for granted, too, I guess. We would go there and visit and just see all the things we never got to see growing up. We would watch `Sesame Street,' people with these tall buildings living in apartments. I had no idea what that life was about."

It's been seven years since the 30-year-old Gourley and his band mates left Alaska for Portland, Ore. Only bassist Zach Carothers remains with Gourley from the original Wasilla crew, but the Last Frontier still resonates in Gourley's songwriting. The title of the band's sixth album and first for Atlantic, "In the Mountain in the Cloud," is a reference to Mount McKinley. And the group's psychedelic bent, reminiscent of the spacier sounds from The Flaming Lips and Built to Spill, recalls Alaska's open, airy vistas.

The band reinforced the association with its first video from the album for "Got it All (This Can't Be Living Now)." It offers a dark, apocalyptic vision played out with Gourley — hatless because the director wanted to see his face — on the runners of a dog sled. Gourley spoke with The Associated Press about that particularly cold shoot, how dog mushing applies to rock `n' roll and his band's struggles with its latest album in a recent phone interview from Portland:

AP: The new video was shot at your parents' home?

Gourley: It was 25 below in our back yard while we were shooting this (laughs). ... The loose idea was obvious — OK, let's take out the dog sled and mush around and all that. When you get back home you just do that anyway, so let's film it. It was freezing cold. ... Frozen hair, frozen beard, mustache. At the end of the day my face would just be pink and swollen.

AP: How did your family end up in Alaska?

Gourley: My dad just left high school in `69, went to Woodstock and, after half a year of college for architecture, just took off for Alaska. He bought a van and went straight into the mountains and built a cabin. He didn't even have the $50 for the deed to the land. He really worked his way through all of that and found my mother along the way in the same town, in Wasilla, and found out they both came from Morrisville, N.Y., in almost the exact kind of way — just out of high school and going to Alaska. Their parents knew each other and they knew each other's parents, but they'd never met. So just a really amazing story.

AP: Why did you give up dog mushing for rock `n' roll?

Gourley: I think the best experience I ever had was also the worst and the one that turned me off of it. We were going to do this long run, you know a three-hour run. We're riding around and we go out on the tundra. I'd never really been out there. ... We were riding along next to these herds of caribou. It was just amazing. But all the way along I'd been taking it in, my hat had kind of blown back and it was ... cold, and my ears just froze really bad. It hurts really bad at first when it's freezing, but it's nothing compared to the thawing.

AP: How much does dog mushing still stick with you?

Gourley: I found it's really just fascinating the way it applies to the business world or what I refer to as the "real world" — because Alaska's just something different. It's just helped me understand things a lot better than I would have growing up somewhere else.

AP: The new album has been received positively, but you've said it was a difficult process with some conflict in the band. How did you work it out?

Gourley: The record was a mess and falling apart because we ... were thinking Led Zeppelin and Rolling Stones for this record. We were beating ourselves up trying to make this crazy record and we had a meeting with Craig (Kallman, Atlantic chairman and CEO) about why we play music and songwriting and I wanted to know what he liked about our band. ... As we left he said, "You know, just make the record you want to make and we'll put it out." That felt good to hear.

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Online:

http://www.portugaltheman.com

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Contact Chris Talbott at http://www.twitter.com/Chris_Talbott.

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Cage to star in film about Alaska serial killer (AP)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – The hunt for Alaska's most infamous serial murderer is about to get the Hollywood treatment.

Academy Award-winning actor Nicolas Cage will star in "Frozen Ground," a movie detailing the police investigation of serial killer Robert Hansen, Variety reported Wednesday. He will play an Alaska State Trooper who investigated the murders.

Filming is scheduled to start in Anchorage on Oct. 10, a second major production filmed in Alaska in the last year. Filming wrapped up last fall on Drew Barrymore's "Everybody Loves Whales."

Emmett Furla Films is financing the $27 million Cage project and producing with Amber Entertainment, Variety reported. Messages left for both by The Associated Press weren't immediately returned Wednesday.

Hansen, who got the nickname "the Butcher Baker," was convicted in 1984 after confessing to killing 17 women and raping another 30 in a 12-year span.

He received a 461 year sentence and is incarcerated at a state prison in Seward.

Hansen owned a bakery in a downtown mini-mall in the 1970s and `80s. He lived across town with his wife and children, and they knew nothing of his other life.

The construction of the trans-Alaska pipeline in the 1970s brought prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers and con artists to Alaska's largest city, all hoping to pry away some of the big money construction workers were pulling in.

Those who sought a quick buck left as abruptly as they arrived in Anchorage, making sudden disappearances commonplace.

Glenn Flothe was the trooper who put Hansen behind bars. Now retired, he didn't immediately return a message to the AP on Wednesday.

But he told the Anchorage Daily News in 2008 that Hansen's victims initially included any woman who caught his eye but that Hansen quickly learned that prostitutes and strippers were harder to track and less likely to be missed.

"He tried to make us think that he had some kind of moral code but the reality was that these street girls and the girls in the bars were easier victims," Flothe told the newspaper.

Hansen would abduct the women and take them to isolated places outside Anchorage. Sometimes he would drive; other times the licensed pilot would fly.

Investigators said in some instances, he would rape the women but return them to Anchorage, warning them not to contact police. Other times, authorities said he would let the women go free in the wilderness and then hunt them with his rifle.

Officials only found 12 bodies of the 17 women he confessed to killing. The others have never been located.

It wasn't immediately clear if Cage would play Flothe in the movie since so many troopers were part of the investigation.

Dave Worrell, manager of the Alaska Film Office, said the production is close to receiving pre-approval for state tax credits, meaning they would be eligible to regain 30 percent of what they spend in Alaska on the production.

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Information from: Anchorage Daily News, http://www.adn.com

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Alaska publishes Palin emails, media hunts nuggets (AFP)

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – Journalists and others began Friday rifling through thousands of emails by or to Sarah Palin, published in response to a freedom of information request into her correspondence as Alaska governor.

The northwestern US state released the mails in print form to a number of media outlets, keen to find nuggets as speculation grows that the Tea Party favorite and former Alaskan governor will run for the White House next year.

More than 24,000 pages of emails were published, although 2,415 pages the state deems privileged, personal or otherwise exempt will remain under wraps.

The media are not the only ones seeking nuggets in the Palin emails: the New York Times has asked its readers to help it sift through the huge mass of mostly banal material.

For anyone who wants to help in the hunt search engines were set up, including at http://palinemail.msnbc.msn.com/palin2011/allList.html.

News outlets including CNN and the Anchorage Daily News asked for Palin's emails to be released in 2008, after Palin became the surprise running-mate of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

At the time officials said they could not be released because of the antiquated electronic databases they were stored on, complicated by the fact that Palin commonly used a Yahoo account to conduct state business.

The release comes as speculation mounts over whether Palin will run for the Republican nomination in next year's election against Democratic President Barack Obama.

Palin has kept the media guessing, including during a "One Nation" bus tour when journalists had to scramble to follow her, with no details given in advance about her travel plans.

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