Portland

Amped Up on Live Music

March 5, 2009

Strange feeling, though not new, to look around a small-venue concert (my favorite) and see I’m the only one looking, well, old. I wonder what the twenty-somethings think when they see my gray and white hair. Have they ever considered that love of live music doesn’t vanish when you hit thirty or well beyond?

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Mixed-Up Portland

March 2, 2009

I’m confused. Portland, my home, is the fifth most popular destination among people moving from state to state. But it’s also the unhappiest city in the country, according to a new study. Something’s amiss. Either the movers haven’t heard how forlorn we Portland residents supposedly are or the findings are wrong.

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Fate of Printed Pages

February 26, 2009

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 […]

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Graffiti and the Fartinator

February 22, 2009

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 […]

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Simpsons Plot Fodder

February 12, 2009

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 […]

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Choirboy Graffiti

February 9, 2009

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.

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Tree Project Karma

February 9, 2009

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 […]

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UFOs over Portland

January 31, 2009

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.

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Sam Adams and Blood of Jesus

January 25, 2009

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 […]

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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, […]

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Library Castaways

January 23, 2009

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 […]

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Power of Love

January 22, 2009

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.

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Inauguration Day

January 20, 2009

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.

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