Move to Portland and you’ll immediately encounter people’s obsession with weather. I’ve lived here nine years and joke about the obsession while enthusiastically contributing to it.
The climate isn’t extreme, though the contrast between summer and winter is. But the weather obsession is less about reviling cold and rain and more about seeking connection to the natural world. That’s not easy, especially for urban dwellers. Monitoring the outdoors reassures us that we’re part of it. And with the weather beyond our control, constantly bemoaning or praising or simply commenting about it is also our way of creating meaning for our lives. Read More
Exercising while listening to music and watching tragic news on CNN is a collision of dissonance.
Picture the scene: two dozen bodies bouncing along on cardio equipment in front of six health club TVs. I’m on the elliptical machine. Music blaring from my ear buds drowns out all other sound, even my panting breaths. My eyes are fixed on the seige at Mumbai, playing out in video images and closed-caption text. But my thoughts careen from one unrelated subject to the next.
The Taj Mahal hotel shudders with explosions and belches black smoke set to an inadvertent soundtrack, Death Cab for Cutie’s “Your Heart Is an Empty Room.” The song doesn’t fit what’s on the screen, though one line jolts me: Burn it down, till the embers smoke on the ground. Read More
I have this thing for gardening. Just me and plants and dirt. Creative yet mindless. Mixing and matching. Trial and error. Nobody telling me how to do it.
My three-year-old son draws better than me, but the yard is a canvas on which I can paint something of merit. I say “I” as if it’s me making the art. But in this part of Oregon, any fool can fashion a wonderland of color and texture and symmetry. The climate in Portland, viewed as inhospitable by some, is ideal for growing things. Read More
Hate knows no boundaries, judging from a map compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. It’s especially disconcerting to see the presence of hate groups in my city, Portland.
But I’m not naïve about such matters. After all, I grew up mainly in the South. Not that racism wasn’t rampant in the Northwest. I’ve read extensively about the Ku Klux Klan’s robust activities in Oregon during the early part of the last century. Read More
Until HBO’s True Blood, I can’t recall a television series with an opening sequence more riveting than the show itself. A foreboding mix of lust, religion, and evil, the montage casts a memorable spell. With each viewing, I’m drawn deeper into the stark settings.
While I enjoyed the series’ first season, which wrapped up Sunday, it fell short of HBO classics The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, and The Sopranos. I learned tonight via MetaFilter that a documentary inspired the opening, propelling Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus to the top of my must-see list.
The visceral appeal of True Blood’s opening isn’t the sex. It’s the southern swamps. I trudged through them in my youth. They entered my blood. Read More
One of my favorite web sites is proof once again that simple ideas can produce breathtaking results. The Big Picture, a seven-month-old photo-journalistic blog of the Boston Globe, demonstrates how so-called old media can do a much better job via new media. Too bad that truth has taken so long to sink in. (I worked on the print side of newspapers for many years before moving to the online side in the heady, pioneering days of the 1990s.)
Two recent features, each with more than two dozen stunning photographs, are stark reminders that the United States is waging two wars in distant lands. The pictures make real what for most of us are distant abstractions in Iraq and Afghanistan. These collections of well-composed single images pack more wallop than any video. They create a lingering truth, a truth not easily blinked away.
Think of Florida, and sprawling tourist venues like Walt Disney World spring to mind. But there was a time when Disney and its imitators didn’t exist, a time when quirky mom-and-pop tourist attractions dotted out-of-the-way places.
One of them rose today from the recesses of my long-ago life. Maybe I thought of Dog Land because of dogs parading past my home office window (Portland residents are dog crazy). Or the desk photo of Rogue, one of the two Labrador retrievers that shadowed me as a kid. Read More
My forty-year high school reunion in September didn’t make me feel old. In fact, I felt young again surrounded by my long-lost friends.
It’s always that way when I’m with my two brothers. In a way, we never age no matter how many lies the mirror tells and how far our attitudes diverge. How could it be any other way? We landed in life so close together, a span of twenty-six months to the day, and rooted next to each other in the same ground.
The passage of forty years came to mind tonight when I read of another four-decade anniversary tomorrow: the release of the Beatles’ White Album. (Listen to a fascinating NPR retrospective here.) Countless times my brothers and I listened to every song, cranked up as loud as our parents would tolerate. Whenever I hear “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” I’m transported to David’s room. He had the killer sound system and the most eclectic musical tastes. Read More
Two barbershops, fifty years and three thousand miles apart.
At one I had my first haircut without a parent in tow. It was in Florida, and I was a young boy new to the South. The father and son proprietors were Alabama crackers. The only time they spoke more than a few words was when talk turned to farming. They grew corn outside my small town of Maitland. I could tell they wanted to be with their crop rather than mess with other people’s hair.
What I remember most was their only employee, a black kid about my age who swept up hair. We often exchanged glances that felt like long conversations between occupants of different worlds. Read More
I’m twittering about Twitter.
Skeptical is the best description of my initial reaction to using this social media service. I was skeptical about sharing observations, random thoughts, and general announcements of what’s happening at any given moment in my life — in only 140 characters. (See examples on the right side of this blog’s home page.) Read More
Some days some things jump out at me. This morning it was signs. I was traveling a familiar route, and three signs looked new to the urban landscape.
“Keep Portland Weird!” cried out from the west side of Music Millenium, the only place I buy CDs in person. I knew the store on East Burnside Street sold bumper stickers with the slogan. Until inquiring inside I didn’t know how many, more than ten thousand, or that the store had copyrighted the slogan. And had the sign painted a year ago. What fog have I been in? Read More
A young man played bagpipes while riding a unicycle on one end of the Portland Farmers Market. On the other, protesters decried passage of the anti-gay marriage amendment in California.
In between on the Park Blocks amid the produce and other foods was scene after scene that made my Saturday morning. Maybe the brisk bike ride to the market with wife and son heightened everything, an endorphin rush of awareness. Whatever the reason, I want more of that drug. Read More
