Sunday, August 28, 2011

HOW TO GET GOOD STUFF CHEAP

come to the yarsel. the signs will be up all over mississippi. and when the king and queen of the avenue (let's be honest, that's what they were all thinking on the ride through friday morning) saw the wide patch of shade cast by the tree in the empty lot at the intersection with fremont, they knew it would happen there.

who owns the lot? who knows. but if people can have their precious wedding photos done at that tire swing, then it has to be okay to set up our living room for sale. and drink rosé. someone has to demonstrate the effect of the glassware. in a simulated cocktail party environment. nora from toronto already got the set of four champagne bowls, and the rest, instead of being repatriated for comedic effect documented photographically at the scenes of all of those crimes they'll be sold. cheap. you won't find a better deal for what you're getting unless you steal it yourself.

no, "the cops," this can't be illegal. (and neither of the two patrol cars that passed through the intersection yesterday afternoon stopped to hassle us.) the time based art festival just started early. yarsel. an exciting preview for the fall art calendar. of all of the portland that portland has to offer after the king and queen are gone. this weekend only. nora paid good hard greenbacks for those glasses, so no one (unbelievably!) was able to muster the audacity to rebuff her comment about her own city's unarguable inferiority to our silly kingdom when we made our introductions. ha. we're abdicating as soon as the throne sells.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

HOW NOT TO

"think of the blog post," she said once i'd had time enough to calm down after walking back to the wapato access greenway parking lot to find the passenger side front window of the imapala smashed in. i didn't. nor had i until after the mexicans (her affectionate sobriquet) at 15th and alberta had already replaced the window and fixed the damage to the door frame and i had the wherewithal to think about blogging, having also, after all, had a dental appointment scheduled for the following morning, and if not for the pain of the inconvenience, then the thought of the expense had been more than enough to distract me from making interesting out of another stupid setback. it wasn't enough that it happened the same day as the car went up for sale, but it was also a sunday, and for whatever reason it seems like that should have some emotional sway for anyone who's ever had to wake up for work on a monday knowing that the dentist would be collecting the next day. bad enough that the impala had to close parents' week during that same a.m., but then who knew if the mexicans would even be able to take the car? but they could, and then they numbed you anyway, and the funny thing (they numbed you) is that this guy has his finger in your mouth and you can't even feel it. listening to down tempo electronica after having been anesthetized probably wasn't the best way to stay awake, but when you snap to, you marvel that you've never fallen asleep at work before now. and then you think of the blog post. because really, there isn't any point in trying to work after that scene.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

PARENTS' WEEK

at the cafes, and in the restaurants, and on the boulevards -- they're unmistakable. they marvel at all of the bike parking and at the beer selections. and they marvel at their guides, those precious ingenues they were forced to abandon to the not so big city and the promise of enough time off to perfect their "young creative" wardrobes (which they share, of course, through portland's highly sophisticated and streamlined system of second hand retail).

so the proud midwestern parents are always easily identifiable by the contrast they strike with their transplanted children, but they're nonetheless dutifully chaperoned through all the famous quirks of the rose city, and if they haven't been footing the bill up until now, they'll be more than happily shelling out this week for the privilege of experiencing the sights, tastes and provocations of their children's adopted home in the company of a worldly non-native (which of course connotes having more knowledge about what makes portland portland than anyone who was actually raised here).

it's parents' week in portland! don't know anyone in the city over fifty? neither does anyone else (except, of course, their own parents). get out and say hello! the only thing cooler than meeting your friends' mothers and fathers is showing your own around with that devil may care nonchalance that erected a thousand pabst billboards and made this city great -- with the sure protection of knowing that everyone knows that we're all in the same boat. and dads, as we've now all been reminded, are the original hipsters. (the perfect accessory!) so if yours is still around and still likes your mother, they deserve a chance to come and see what they did to the world. and they'll pay for it in one way or another. go on. get in on the fun.

Monday, August 15, 2011

CHICKEN HELL

among the works included in the inaugural edition of monkey business: new writing from japan is a collection of vignettes by hiromi kawakami, and the first of those is a short, short story called "chicken hell." as the first person narrator of the piece has described to her by an old man in her neighborhood, the chicken hell is the one reserved for people who are unkind to chickens. and in chicken hell, the damned spend one of their afterlives being tortured by a giant, vengeful chicken.

chelsea hasn't stopped torturing either of the other backyard chickens since asshole died and left her at the top of the pecking order. (you should see the bald patch she's pecked into the smaller speckled chicken's back!) it's possible that our inability to end chelsea's rampage of terror might land us, as the other backyard chickens' stewards, in chicken hell ourselves, but the more interesting question is where the cosmos is going to send chelsea.

is the situation in the coop a chicken hell unto itself wherein the tortured chickens are reincarnations of chicken torturers who have been condemned twofold to suffer the tortures of chelsea while existing as an object of revulsion from their past lives? or, is there a special chicken hell reserved for chelsea? we'd thought of slaughtering her and taking her to the table (something will have to be done with all of the backyard chickens before there's no one left at home to take care of them), but that was before we realized that we might come to embody chelsea's attributes were we to eat her. even though the worst of those might just be insecurity -- not being able to stand having to share the coop and the run with a chicken prettier than herself -- we weren't about to run the risk, regardless.

if one thing's for sure, it's that things are hell for chelsea. the beauty of that circular argument just goes to show the viciousness of the entire universal process. sure, you could change hands, but there's going to come a point when nobody's going to want to eat you, chelsea, and it's not because the entire city went vegetarian. and portland, you take this as guidance come the days we won't be around to advise you. be nicer. from what we can tell, that vengeful chicken is fierce, and you don't want to be anywhere near chicken hell when chelsea picks a fight with it.

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

BRIGHT LIGHTS AND PROMISES; or, THE STYLISH URGENCY OF SECOND PERSON PRESENT TENSE, part 2

and lo, it came to pass that something on the summer reading list was read. the list, it would seem, although still fated to near fatal procrastination, was not destined to pass the season as just a convoluted "gossip girl" reference and an even more abstruse paean to the better half of moniquipher's detour away from new york. ultimately, though, and judging from our list of bibliophiles, speculators and devotees, bright lights, big city is a book that people like ourselves should certainly want to read, or at least a book that people like ourselves would be assumed to appreciate, an assumption which was reified when a friend of mine recently returned to me "my" copy of the book with another one that i had actually lent her. and i decided to interpret that event ominously, if only so as to free myself of responsibility for neglecting this year's published reading list out of sheer laziness. in other words, i had the book so i read it.

read from the midst of the creative cultural crisis that is the city of portland, oregon in its twenties, bright lights, big city is an interesting bit of nostalgia. jay mcinerney's boozing, vacuum nosed, twenty-four year old fact checker would rather be in the fiction department, but at least he can conflate his own name with the name of the esteemed magazine where he works -- or at least until the boozing and the coke snorting and the party going get completely in the way of his being able to show up at the magazine's offices near times square. the opening of his story, which he tells (about himself) in second person present tense, shouldn't be all that unfamiliar to the creatively ambitious twenty-somethings playing the game of going-out-informs-artistic-experience in america's contemporary hot spots:

You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, although the details are fuzzy...The night has already turned on that imperceptible pivot where two A.M. changes to six A.M. You know this moment has come and gone, but you are not yet willing to concede that you have crossed the line beyond which all is gratuitous damage and the palsy of unraveled nerve endings.


indeed, the narrator of bright lights, big city is the quintessence of the quarter life crisis that has, over the past few years, been so frequently cited as the endemic affliction of the current generation of emerging adults (wherein that emergence might last until the early thirties). but whereas the sense of looming existential catastrophe that the narrator tries to ride out on a succession of fat lines is itself the central revelation of the book, it would seem that the sympathy that contemporary young readers feel for the narrator is more akin to aspiration. the disillusion that the "you" of bright lights, big city experiences is now an admirable and artistic mode of disillusionment. "You could start your own group -- the Brotherhood of Early Unfulfilled Promise," has become, instead of a statement of reflexive sarcasm, a proud motto for the self-designated initiates of that very group. delusional hipsterity: the glorious martyrdom of wasted talent.

or maybe it's just here in portland that over-intoxicated bar talk about lack of opportunity has become ambition itself. for all you know, as it were, this post could be nothing more than a statement of reflexive sarcasm. ("Then your night life started getting more interesting and complicated, and climbing out of bed became harder and harder. You were gathering experience for a novel.") brooklyn may be dressing itself in our love more than ever, but i hear that brooklynites still go in for interviews -- and unemployment where they're trying is even higher than it is here. plus, they're right next to that big city. inasmuch, maybe the promise of the dream is, for them, tangible beyond the pages of a work like mcinerny's and doesn't, as a result, end with just the dreaming. or maybe they're just as desirous of a beautiful reason to soak themselves in dopamine as we are and we're actually all just nostalgic for a new york that's been long since impossible, except that the brooklyintes just have more expensive rent.

so, again, no "new york" for us (just yet?), be that for expense or other impossibility...but less and less portland either. that's a somewhat painful recognition, but maybe to acknowledge that is the better exegesis of mcinerny's book, a book that we can regardless keep on our bookshelves, and maybe visitors to wherever those bookshelves are will give us the benefit of the doubt. after all, "You read the bookshelves. In the examination of personal libraries is an entire hermeneutics of character analysis."

against delusional hipsterity -- or not.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

HOW TO LOOK ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, part 3; OUR GENERATION

the weather wasn't cooperating yesterday morning as we were trying to get ourselves excited for going to spend the day at the washougal river, a trip that had to happen yesterday if it was going to happen this weekend, because moniquipher's social calendar for this summer is almost uncomfortably cramped -- not to mention the separate social calendars of the couple's constituent parts (sorry tom!).

it was still cloudy when we put down our towels on top of a dry span of rock between those two waterfalls. was one of them dougan? that was the namesake of the dirt road we took to get to our spot, but we'd parked at least a mile from where the dirt road split off from the last paved one, and there had been at least three other waterfalls visible through the foliage between the road and the river ravine as we were driving in.

the sun came out by three, but i'd already decided not to hold out for it and to go for a swim, so i was more than acclimated to the cold when the day finally got warm. at least i'd dry more quickly, which was incentive enough for me to go for another dip in the deeper pools under the bridge up the road from where we parked and just downriver from one of the waterfalls. i didn't, however, attempt the jump from waterfall number two that all of the high school kids were making when we arrived.

the day wasn't dissatisfying, but moniquipher and company all expected to be as heat and sun exhausted from the trip to the washougal as we had been after getting back to the city from rooster rock the week before. luckily, we'd had our day made for us in the parking lot of new seasons before leaving to the river. 12:30 p.m. is an unarguably decent hour. and it was lucky for all of us that the hair of the dog had been necessary for heather's morning recuperation. those little bottles of stoli are so cute! and new seasons had sparkling water and organic grapefruit juice on sale (it was summer inside the store, even if it wasn't outside).

that woman in the old lime green hatchback didn't know what she was getting herself into when she came over to ask through the cracked right rear window how long we were planning to sit in that parking space, which was apparently hers. i don't know why she thought that i would be driving miss daisy and that the two of us in the car weren't waiting for friends, but she could have used a driver herself. and that's certainly not agism, she just seemed like she could have used some stress relief (her social calendar must be tight as well), and she was the one who blamed the mindset of our generation for her escalation of the conflict.

stress relief certainly wasn't what the lady got when heather got out of the car. you would think the lady would have expected something after the call out she made, but she was running back to her hatchback after the first swing. she didn't even stick around to get her parking space when we finally pulled out. we may not have had sunshine at the river, but heather's sparkling, vitamin enriched sunshine in a bottle brightened all of our days. new seasons may be the friendliest store in town, but that lady might be keeping her distance for a while. more friendship for us. and deals on whoop ass for the rest of the summer.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

SON LOS TOREROS: TAKING THE BULL BY THE HORNS

on monday, in a decision that has exploded comments sections across the left liberal blogosphere, the spanish government declared bullfighting "an artistic discipline and cultural product" and transferred its administration from the ministry of the interior to the ministry of culture, which will henceforth be responsible for the "development and protection" of bullfighting across mainland spain -- except, that is, in catalonia, where a bullfighting ban passed last year will take effect in january 2012. (bullfighting has been illegal in the canary islands since 1991.)

for a stirring, informative and (in most cases) intelligent discussion of the ethical implications of the designation of bullfighting as an art, visit the comments at mary elizabeth william's article on the spanish government's announcement at salon.com. william's piece is decidedly more opinion than reportage, but it isn't nearly so one-sided and dubiously researched as a similar article at care2 (which seems to imply that bulls are jumping into stands and injuring spectators during most every fight).

but let's leave it to those comments sections to decide whether the bullfight is art or simple cruelty. after all, vitriolic, hypothetical arguments with other guests of the ethical vacuum of cyberspace are an important american cultural product, and one that deserves to be protected. hey! teetering socialist government of spain: that's what we call the first amendment. listen up...or something.

it's speculated that the decision to ban the bullfight in catalonia was more an attempt to distance the catalonian autonomous community from madrid and "spanish" culture than a stance on the fight itself. similarly, it's not inconceivable that madrid's decision to enshrine bullfighting as an essential part of spanish heritage and national identity was a conscious attempt by the incumbent socialist prime minister to ingratiate himself with those spaniards who appear to be leaning right ahead of the general elections scheduled for november 20, elections in which the conservative popular party is expected to take control of the government. in other words, the toro bravos might have now become victims of cultural manipulation on multiple levels. still, it's sad to think that the bullring in barcelona will never see another fight after the end of the current season in september.

that sadness should be tempered, however, for the fact that jose maria manzanares will be closing the season in a fight at the real maestranza de caballería in seville on september 25, and the knowledge that bullfighting won't soon exit the cultural stage in the autonomous community of andalusia. a distaste for hemmingway is only part of why death in the afternoon won't make it into this year's summer reading pile (although into the arena might), but at least there will still be opportunities to see jose maria looking damn fine in the pants of his traje de luces -- and maybe even an opportunity for a touch if he can grab a couple of trofeos and win the honor of being carried out of the maestranza.

that the spanish bullfight is a holdover from the bull sacrifices of greco-roman mithraism, and that mithraism has been termed a dress rehearsal for christianity seem particularly applicable to the heritage and national identity of spain, at least as far as the light of richard wright's pagan spain is cast -- or at least as far as can be inferred from the publisher's synopsis of that book and the excerpt from it available in richard wright reader, which is the one of the two books available from the multnomah county library.

that association with the pagan inclinations of roman catholicism might be what attracted madonna to the bullfight, although it might have just been the matadors and their trajes -- or maybe just emilio muñoz, the one particular matador that figures as the center of the motif for the video of her 1994 song "take a bow." throwing madonna into the mix will no doubt raise other, even more polarizing arguments over the designation of certain cultural products as art, but the goal of introducing her to the discussion is to indicate that madonna started it. she was into matadors when jose maria manzanares was just twelve (the age, incidentally, at which he fought and killed his first bull). madonna did everything before anyone else did it. it can't be long before lady gaga does the bullfighter thing too, and bruce weber can probably introduce her to jose maria.

the other week at the albina press, the ownership and management of toro bravo and tasty n' sons were arguing not so discreetly over a request for a raise made by one of the men present. profits are, apparently, flat, but the chef or manager or whoever he was stood his ground. he left, not in a huff, but with an obvious, stylistic fury and with his one supporter in the argument humbly in tow. that's the art of the bullfight. the name of the first of those restaurants just happens to work well as a metaphor -- needless to say that the menu makers and management there would probably pay top dollar if they could get their hands on the post-fight meat of a real toro bravo. let's hope they've switched out the number for the spanish ministry of the interior with the one for the ministry of culture in the office rolodex.