I spent a long time on the print side of newspapers and a good number of years starting and nurturing their online offspring. These days I’m online much of each day and night but still have this thing for the printed page.
It began, like many things, with a childhood ritual: plodding barefoot to the end of our driveway in Maitland, Florida and fetching the morning paper. As a kid I also fell in love with magazines, especially Life, which opened the world to me in pictures. Read More
Graffiti fascinates me. It’s hard to miss in Portland, especially east of the Willamette River where I live. Some is artistic. Most is illegible, as if space aliens scrawl communiques at night, unaware that their writings generally make no sense to Earthlings. And defacing property, no matter the creativity involved, is a crime costing major money to clean up.
Why then would a retail store inside a mall festoon its facade with unreadable graffiti? Even the font in the store name resembles taggers’ bold lettering. Read More
Getting my hair cut always yields a story or two. That’s because the two barbers and their clients talk a lot. Today the friendly banter included my barber, Horace, recounting how he attended Portland’s Lincoln High School in the 1970s, overlapping for a year with Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons.
“We talked occasionally even though I was a freshman and he was a senior,” Horace said.
Then Horace told me his last name, which I should have known considering he’s cut my hair for two years. “It’s Simpson.” Read More
Finally, graffiti I can read. And it’s not only legible but painted in a flamboyant cursive script, conveys a simple but powerful admonition, and is brazenly displayed in the heart of one of Portland’s most-tagged neighborhoods. Read More
Maybe aches and pains from transplanting a tree explain why I keep thinking about the Japanese maple. But the real reason, I’m afraid, is irrational emotional attachment for something not even in my yard.
The tree belongs to friends in Portland’s Sabin neighborhood. I spent several hours Saturday helping them extricate it from a tight spot between patio and garage, then relocating it to their front yard. Read More
An amateur photographer obsessed with jet contrails snapped photographs from the Burnside Bridge about ten days ago. Later, while reviewing his images, he noticed two tiny circles of light above Oregon Health Sciences University.
He zoomed in on the circles and came away convinced that they were UFOs. Read More
I’ve come around to the view that Portland Mayor Sam Adams should not resign for lying about his relationship with another gay man. I say man because that’s how Beau Breedlove describes himself at age seventeen, though both say the sexual side of their brief relationship began when Breedlove turned eighteen.
As awful as Adam’s lies to the public have been, he’s the best person to run the city. Considering the deteriorating economic challenges we face, I’d rather have as mayor someone who’s progressive and pragmatic and proven. The only remaining question: can Adams be effective after all the shame he has brought upon himself. If he’s ineffective and a state investigation of his relationship with Breedlove discloses illegalities, then he can be recalled after his first six months in office. Read More
I delay going to Costco as long as possible. But requirements of life, purchased inexpensively, make the trek unavoidable. Let’s face it, bulk toilet paper and laundry detergent and printer cartridges are essentials.
Judging from the overflow crowd today, lured partly by the approaching expiration of coupons, the economy isn’t shattered quite yet. That said, I did overhear several couples arguing about what was the best deal.
Savings aside, the experience was existential. A few times as I negotiated the crowded aisles and endured the food sample ladies reciting their scripts like robots, I wondered whether this was what life has become: a feeding frenzy of consumerism in a cavernous warehouse. Read More
Sometimes you see something over and over without really seeing it. Then one day it registers more vividly and emotionally. The scene, static and benign before, comes alive.
That was my experience today at the Multnomah County Library in downtown Portland. I had popped in to check out a book. A library employee, whose makeup and attire and attitude reminded me of a surly Boy George, had to retrieve the book from storage. So I had fifteen minutes to kill and wandered the second and third floors. The tables and PCs were jammed with men wearing the scruffy, weathered look of the homeless. Read More
Anyone doubting the grassroots power of online social media should consider this story, which I wrote for today’s edition of The Oregonian.
Without Twitter, Facebook, and blogs, a son’s heart-warming attempt to help his mother’s financially ailing bookstore would have never reached and connected with so many people so quickly. Read More
My day began with champagne and two friends, Benjamin Alexander Clarke and Kelley Burke, at an elbow-to-elbow cafe, Krakow Koffeehouse, where we watched President Obama sworn in. It ended with a neighborhood potluck dinner and never-to-forget, flag-waving march with 40 other people through the streets of Portland. Read More
An email promoted tonight’s showing of vintage film footage from the civil rights movement. The location: a pizza place on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Northeast Portland.
It seemed a fitting way to spend the evening with wife and little boy. So we sat with about fifty people we didn’t know — white, black, Hispanic, and Asian — in the perfect prelude to tomorrow’s presidential inauguration. Read More
Not far from my house is a big faux Santa Claus butt. It’s actually a painting of his butt made to look like it’s sticking through a tire. The painting hangs from a tree like a, well, tire swing.
A nearby peace sign I understand as a year-round decoration. But whatever clever humor the butt might provide faded weeks ago. Read More
