THE ALPENROSE THURSDAY SERIES IS DECADENT AND DEPRAVED

i took the beaverton-hillsdale highway out to the track, riding fast down the relative straightaway between capital highway and the hills on shattuck. it was warm and muggy, the humidity a rare but sufferable effect of summer's long awaited arrival to portland, and my back was soaked with sweat under my shoulder bag. my outfit was functional enough for city riding, but the chafing at my saddle reminded for the fourth time in a week not to ride anything more than five consecutive miles on the fixed gear without wearing a pair of shorts with a chamois. i'd pounded a pint before heading into the upper altitudes of southwest portland, and i'm hard pressed now to say whether the numbness between my legs was any less tolerable than the smell of the ammonia i was pissing out my face. there was a slim chance that i'd make it in time for the last half of the races.

this was the first time i'd been to the alpenrose velodrome since the opener of last year's cyclocross season, but before that, when i used to more regularly spend time in the southwest hills, i went to the track races nearly every thursday of the summer. the alpenrose thursday series draws both the cream and the dregs of the portland bicycle community, everyone united by a devotion to the trappings of an atavistic cycling culture. alpenrose is one of only twenty or so velodromes left in the united states and it draws the largest crowd of any of them during the alpenrose challenge in july. it was built for the 1967 national championships, which was also the nadir of its glory. it's still in use, but set so far from the center of "new" portland it feels more like a relic of old oregon's libertarian pioneer spirit than a symbol of progress for cyclesport. there are rumors that alpenrose might be demolished and an indoor venue erected at the site of the collosseum across the river from downtown. it was only a coincidence of timing that i was once able to ride the juan de fuca velodrome in victoria, british columbia before it was razed to make room for more soccer fields. i was so excited that i'd been able to get my bicycle over the ten foot fence that i did my laps despite the drizzle and having forgotten to fasten the chin strap of my helmet.

it's lucky that there's no restricted viewing at alpenrose, as i doubt that my appearance would have helped convince the track officials that 'looking good in pants' was a publication worthy of press privileges. plus, i didn't have any mace. at any rate, i positioned myself away from the better heeled spectators seated at the center of the track, probably family of the riders from portland's dynastic elite racing teams. neither of our camps saw fit to exchange any pleasantries, but that didn't stop the poodles from waddling over for a curious sniff.

the fir trees of forest park command the view to the distant north of the track, a refreshing reminder that you don't have to go too far from the center of the city to know you're in the pacific northwest. but as the sun set thursday, the air cooled and with the resulting breeze the musty smell of the stagnant water from the duck pond at the alpenrose dairy crept over the rise at the south edge of the track and onto the stands.

the racers stretched in the grass by the officials' booth or tended their bicycles while making what you can imagine from a distance to be a kind of locker room chat with their competitors. a track bicycle is necessarily simple and streamlined, and the modern ones that racers ride at alpenrose aren't fundamentally different from the ones that were raced at the end of the nineteenth century. a century of materials engineering later and the bicycles are lighter and their bearings run more smoothly, but the basic mechanics are unchanged. the only real and visible difference is the bling. as track racing has gone slowly out of fashion over the years, track racers have become more and more fashionable.

the racers at the thursday series tuned pretty, custom fitted bicycles with impeccably considered color palettes, fast money on two wheels made for nothing else but to turn left over and over around a closed loop for one-sixth of a mile. funny, because the purses that go to the winners at the thursday series don't cover much more than their registration fees. i'd arrived just as the final category three race was starting, which meant getting to watch the elite riders warming up around the smaller loop on the lawn. the bodies at the track are just as fine as the bicycles, and the show on the field rivals any of the races. the thursday series is a spectacle for sure, albeit sparsely attended, and track racers anywhere should be forgiven their skinsuited preening just for letting us watch them fly over the banks of the track within inches of each others' wheels. but whether it's the sport itself or the excitement of exhibitionism, the racers have to love it. the banks at the alpenrose velodrome are some of the steepest in the country, and riders have to maintain a quick minimum speed just to stay upright. their wheels visibly wobble as they jostle for position, and a crash here almost invariably means a shattered collar bone.

i don't know the rules. the category three race seemed short, but i wasn't watching the race carefully enough to guess how many laps they did. most of my beer had burned off during my ride, and i was thinking on whether to regret not having a second one that would have lasted me to the end of the last race, so i don't remember seeing a number on the lap counter at the start line.

the counter was set at 50 for the category one and two race and after a back and forth with the riders lined up on the rail on the outer edge of the track at the start line an official decided that there would be points every ten. i still didn't know how the points worked and i didn't understand most of what the announcer was saying over the old pa system. a few times he shouted something about "letting the rabbit run," and then something on how the riders were sure gonna follow it to the carrot but not exhaust themselves trying to get there first. the rabbit had something to do with why the riders would intermittently ride up the steeper banks at the narrow ends of the track to slow down. apparently getting to 50 the fastest wasn't the only goal of this particular race; but as long as the riders came past where i was sitting i was satisfied. unfortunately, there also seemed to be a sort of sacrifice strategy involved whereby a rider from one team drew out the competition before dropping off the track to let his less spent teammates attack. for points or for the rabbit i wasn't sure, but the one who stopped coming around was the real stud of the group, and it happened after about only 20 laps. slow countdown to zero.

with the elite race over i waited for signs of the madison race -- the real and main event as far as i was concerned -- to take shape out of the group of riders on the lawn. the madison is named for the velodrome at the first madison square garden and dates back to when professional track cyclists were the best paid and most physically tortured athletes in the country. the rest of the world calls it after america, the only place in the world that could have originated a cycling event so spectacular and so stubbornly defiant of the dangers inherent to the sport. madison riders race in teams of two with one rider covering distance toward the finish while his teammate rests at the top of one end of the track. when it's time to switch, the resting rider drops off the bank onto the inner part of the track, and when his teammate overtakes him, he reaches up to have his hand grabbed by the rider in front and is hurtled forward to continue the race.

i realize, full of fear and loathing, that there's hardly a single team warming up (one half of one, actually). no one seems to have registered. i check my phone for the time and see a message from the guy down my street who won't stop texting me to hang out since last weekend.

"that's what you're doing tonight? you can objectify men at my friend's party."

i'm about to scream that there are journalists in the crowd and that someone needs to come through for me on the posted schedule because besides the duck pond smell the weather is permitting. i could have made things up at my computer without coming out to the hills, goddammit.

but i was spared having to poach the spotlight from the looming tragedy when two of the gentle lovers finally decided just to do a demonstration. a short demonstration and not nearly as balletic as with six other riders in competition, but i got what i came for without having to make a scene in front of the track gentry.

a seemingly well intentioned couple approaches me on my way out, and no, i don't know if there will be races tomorrow.

*****

the blogger is riding back into the city, thinking about more beer and whether those riders ever get to let themselves drink any. i'm sure that if i have a couple i can come up with something clever and ballsy to respond to that text.

HOW TO MAKE CULTURE

hip hop knows how to look good in pants, even if 'looking good in pants' doesn't know much about hip hop -- or music criticism, for that matter. (we'd hoped to have someone on that by now, but summer got in the way.) the virtuosity of the sistafist post notwithstanding, this blog's so far insights into the musical world can generally be collected under the like/dislike rubric or a song/album's suitability as accompaniment to some activity (dance, non-dance exercise, non-dance non-exercise movement, non-dance non-exercise non-movement).

so it was fun, first to see, and then to read the article on sissy bounce in the july 26th new york times magazine and be able to gloat at an already year old familiarity with the subject. no one should be surprised anymore by our cutting edge cultural awareness. just remember that parade of purse queens at the armani spring/summer 2011 runway show in milan. plus, everyone knows that a times feature on anything means that it already got cool no more recently than six months ago. (they felt the need to let us know in both the top and style sections of sunday's paper that the fedora is trending. it's safe to assume that you can expect to see 'looking good in pants' syndicated at the nytimes.com 'portland journal' by the end of the year). the issue here is different.

bounce is a hip hop varietal common to new orleans, and sissy bounce is a sub-genre (in name only, really) coined by music writer alison fensterstock after the bunch of homos and cross-dressers stealing the national bounce stage. in the words of katey red, one of artists interviewed for the times article, "ain’t no such thing as 'sissy bounce.' it’s bounce music. it’s just sissies that are doing it." and katey's description of the crowd at one of her shows in dallas is enough to describe the scene: "mostly a bunch of nasty hos with they shorts up they ass, trying to shake like a dog."

'looking good in pants' readers are sure to be re-conjuring whatever images they brought to mind yesterday of the sistafist ladies doing a saturday night show. they wouldn't be too far off the mark, because sissy bounce is also marching proudly to the beat of the boner parade. it's more than probably the case that sistafist (or the beats of their djs at least) are conscious manifestations of the spread of bounce. even for his untimeliness, jonathan dee, the writer of the times article, deserves respect for his perspicacity on an important point: "the fact is that the notion of unabashedly gay hip-hop is like catnip to some alternative-music scenes around the country." can all of portland say "myeooowww?"

the crucial issue, the crux of the rise (or media worthiness) of sissy bounce is, however, slightly removed. the BUTT blog was promoting bounce artist sissy nobby as early as april 21st of 2009 and featured a post that linked to this mix in may of the same year. (the mix is currently testing successful for non-dance non-exercise non-movement accompaniment. projections for dance are also good.) and damned if bounce wasn't the soundtrack of pride 2009.

for anyone who missed the first season of "glee," the gays pretty much make culture. by the magic of nineties television, the gays have also been bestowed the power to make culture safe -- just as the gays were made safe themselves by that same media phenomenon. a gay sensibility bred with a minority one is almost unstoppable -- or, at any rate, irresistibly consumable. that's looking good in pants, even if they're ugly. (follow us on the real estate market too!) no matter that bounce was just a flash in the pan for us last summer or, for that matter, for "some alternative-music scenes around the country."* it's not just something that angry black people do anymore. just letting you know, again, in case you don't pick up that magazine. we love you.

now that's music journalism. if only the sunday crossword didn't come with so much responsibility. you're welcome.

*mstrkrft out of toronto gave a nod to bounce on an eponymous track on "fist of god" (the single was out in spring 2008), but we all know that canada is much more in touch with its gay side than america.

THREE LADIES OF ILL REPUTE; or DOES THE CARPET MATCH THE DRAPES, DOES THE BELT MATCH THE BOOTS?

andrea joined the bike gang for one night back in 2006 -- or 2007 -- or sometime back when there was still a bike gang, sometime around 2006 or 2007. caroline went by creflo back when there was a bike gang, and she was missing one of her front teeth. creflo meant something like missing one of your front teeth. andrea was missing a front tooth then too. she's still missing a front tooth, but she had a gold one at one point in between then and now. caroline's new tooth is of the stuff that dentists use to make new teeth. back when both andrea and creflo were missing front teeth it made sense for andrea to join up for a night after she ran into the gang on the esplanade and saw caroline smile. gang activities were mostly drinking. you know, community service.

caroline hitched herself to a different, more permanent though maybe less stable wagon, but andrea is still giving back. sometimes she makes little apartments in her mind as safe havens for kids on drugs. that way the kids can just laugh when they're tripping and fall into the bathtub. but no one's made it so easy for andrea. bad dre dre (she's the one with the badass moniker now) has done time. "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth." but that hasn't changed her mission. she takes the world as it comes. she even went to church and told the preacher, and now he wants her as a sunday school teacher. red lipstick, red hair, pink lips and all.

go ahead and call her a whore. she'll ask you to, actually, during her introduction in the sistafist anthem, but be warned of an important distinction: she's a drunk ass bitch, not a prostitute. all this will rhyme in your head once you've heard bad dre dre, em snatch and c-bag rapping and dancing on stage in front of a crowd of bobbing, grinding portland. and you'll know it's portland because of its initial reluctance to dance, despite that everyone in the crowd is there with friends to see their friends and knows that only their friends could have fostered something like sistafist, and only in this city.

sistafist is "three sassy drunk bitches dripping with gold" (beats by dj solomon and armatronix), and their lyrics are endlessly quotable. quotable not in the ironic tee hee hee way that so much indie rap gets off on, but in the way of you're desperately jealous of those drunk ass bitches when you see them walking single file over the lower walkway of the steel bridge looking like ghetto fabulous abbey road and you'd do anything to shine like them. they're serious, and it's not easy sounding serious when you're rhyming on boner parades and penis gauntlets. (as fun as both of those things might sound, don't doubt that dre dre, em and c-bag will drink you under the table, fuck you, do a rubbing of your credit card and then fuck your friend.)

portland is renowned for ill repute. before the nineties you couldn't do anything here without two forms of id. for anyone familiar with portland's shady, divey past, these three ladies aren't an unlikely appearance on the scene. and that's how it should be. especially in summertime: we want it sweaty and loud and dancing in heels, and then we want to be sweaty and loud and dancing in heels. that's a saturday night. gay or straight. visitors welcome. andrea is from iowa...or she used to date someone from there. it doesn't matter.

just be ready, as sistafist will tell you, to "give it up, on the floor. show us what the fuck you came here for." don't be too nervous, though. most of the rest of them probably won't be dancing at first either. plus, community service gang or no, you'll always have a cool place to crash if you get too messed up, courtesy of bad dre dre.

1983

mona sings summer '10:

call me a hipster i plead the fifth
ain't no white subculture gonna claim this
summertime love summertime fun
grab me a boy cause i'm gonna get some
ready set go foot on the mark
i won't charge you this time it's off the chart
but let it be known this shit ain't free
beauty fades quick it's a luxury

buy a guy a new purse?

BORED IS AS BORED DOESN'T; or, BOREDOM ISN'T AS BOREDOM DOES

an aunt of mine, the sister of my mother's that, per family lore, sailed fast and loose away from her parents on the first yacht out of the holy see, once cautioned me against the pitfalls of too much itinerancy. at the time, i was visiting her on a psychological convalescence away from my own parents at a cabin she owned in the woods in tennessee. it was the summer after my college graduation, and we spent the better part of our weekend together talking past and future plans over roasts and whiskey. addressing my proclivity for sporadic and impulsive relocation, my aunt gave me a piece of advice of the sort that an early twenty-something can only take from his mother's sister when he's shared with her most of a bottle of drank: "christopher," she told me, "there's no geographical cure."

that aunt no longer lives in tennessee, and i moved from the midwest to the west coast not long after that visit. but her advice was surely still sage, at least inasmuch as i remember it half a decade later. novelty and dynamic environs can be grand for self discovery, but don't expect to discover someone else.

and that's a sentiment very much akin to the wisdom that the mother of the unnamed protagonist in lee rourke's the canal imparts (in recollection) to him after a childhood attempt at running away. the son can't remember exactly what made him leave home in the first place, or most of what his mother said after he came home later that day, but one thing did stick: "there's no point in running away. never run away, all you find is yourself. there's nothing else to find." and it would seem from his actions throughout the rest of the canal that our protagonist has taken that to heart.

the canal is about boredom. more specifically, it's about embracing boredom -- or at least not being distracted by the things that we regularly use to distract ourselves from boredom. when not in memory, the protagonist spends the book sitting at a bench along the titular canal. he sometimes shares the bench with a woman. (at times he seems to want to share the bench with the woman more than she does.) they talk. and that's the 'looking good in pants' plot summary. you'll find plenty of analyses of those two's relationship elsewhere. to be honest, the boredom statement already felt too marketing tagline clichéd. i'd like not to wonder how many other reviews have opened their plot explanations with that salvo. it's generic and mundane, and, well, that's just boring.

the other critics can treat rourke's language, too. i haven't read rourke's collection of stories, so can't speculate on the idiosyncrasies of his voice in the canal. or i won't, at any rate. and anyway, the canal doesn't particularly present anything syntactically striking. not to say that the writing is poor, anything but. the prose of boredom, however, isn't as dry or as sparing as we should expect...but the jacket copy can tell you that.

more important is what presumes the boredom of the canal. in other words, what's exciting about lee rourke's boredom (everyone writing about the canal should get to wallow in the cleverness of that juxtaposition) is the contemporary significance of what got him there. rourke's protagonist sits at his bench and, literally, watches the world go by. and as the world goes by, he has time to wonder, a luxury that the passing world hasn't afforded itself among its many luxuries. we are the new urbanites. the gentrifiers. the designer vanguard of post-industrial lifestyle capitalism. and yet something is wanting. a good deal of something. it always is and has been, of course; and so that something is analogous to the dissatisfaction and ennui of every other generation of literary discontent, but not exactly the same; and significant because our crisis isn't for our want of purpose but for the impossibility of its realization. the promise of our creative uniqueness was sadly hollow. we are, verily, "nothing but here. endless here."

in that sense, rourke would seem to be nothing but a contemporary mouthpiece for an all too familiar trope of existentialism. and granted, the canal doesn't fail to evoke camus, genet, sartre in its discussion of violence and the isolated individual -- a theme set off by a dialogue between the couple at the bench on the motivations behind international terrorism (an element that felt uncomfortably too topical at first but finds its place in the whole). that dialogue then contrasts with the acts (active or recounted) of the characters themselves. but rourke's individuals are not dispassionate, or even detached. in fact, it's the desire to impart significance to their actions (or their disappointment at the loose motivations of others') that allow the man and woman at the canal to turn the familiar trope on its head.

one section of the canal is titled "weight," which can't but encourage comparisons with the similarly titled sections of the unbearable lightness of being, whose author, milan kundera, owes an undeniable debt to the (especially french) existentialists. but unlike in kundera, rourke's characters struggle not with an essential futility or the insignificance of "lightness," but with the gravity of an amorphous weight. in the canal, the march of society isn't the insurmountable monolith that it is for kundera. for rourke, existence is innately weighted, and boredom is embraced as a vantage from which to discover and confront real life. we're here and that's it. you might even get the best perspective on yourself when you stay put and actually have a look. just to chase a shiny new future isn't actually going to get us there. "never run away, all you find is yourself." and, sitting by the canal while a new london rages to build itself around them, rourke's characters struggle with the understanding that, indeed, there's nothing else to find. so why is everyone running?

the coots and swans on the canal are generally unmoved by other than their day to days, only occasionally occasionally disturbed by dredgers or a flying motor scooter. the rest of them, though, look to the tv. they dress smartly and conduct affairs. they expect great things out of steel and plate glass. and in that fragile high tower they know that they're special, and they fill their time so as never to be bored.

rourke's greatest success in the canal is, perhaps, in his elucidation of that phenomenon, his subtle confrontation of our modern obsession with fame. ironically, it's the same twenty-first century development that's promised us recognition for our store bought identities that also affords rourke's protagonist the leisure to sit by the canal and be bored by it all. there's a kind of love story, too, raised voices at times, and even some nearly melodramatic gallantry. but we've all read love stories, had quarrels. how boring. farcically almost, and for worse or for better, that's all there is. at one point, in another recollected anecdote, our man at the canal recounts: "it was at that moment, there on the cold pavement, that i realised i was ordinary and not destined for great things." not so the canal.

HOW TO HOW TO; or, ON KEEPING UP APPEARANCES

i finished the canal nearly two weeks ago, and i've been reading the woman in the dunes. i did, though, venture off the summer reading list to read the wild creatures (sam d'allesandro's collection of stories, mentioned at the BUTT blog a couple of weeks ago) and to review bonsai by alejandro zambra. the zambra book i'd read last year over a week during which i spent a part of my lunch each day in the aisle of the bookstore standing and reading one of its sections. it's short, but i wouldn't necessarily recommend reading it in one sitting as zambra's new book has been recommended in the review at powells.com, the website that showed a used copy of that new book at powell's burnside where neither i nor a staff member were able to find said copy after i rushed to get it about five minutes later. so i settled for buying a copy of bonsai -- of which of course powell's burnside had five new copies at a reduced price. damn bookstore. and now i couldn't want the private lives of trees more.

reviews of the canal are popping up everywhere; but nowhere you'd look, and that's why you come here. expect my review (to be date stamped) tomorrow. both the book and my impressions are, worry not, still fresh. the salon.com book club is already a failure. well, i suppose they did discuss through that one book. but we're not so ashamed anymore of a club not springing from 'looking good in pants' -- though it's sounding like melville house might give free copies of every man dies alone to any interested clubs, so...

in lieu, we'd hoped to start on a series on date lurking, but the cat was let out early on our subject, and although our cover wasn't, purportedly, blown (i.e. no identifications could be made), a victimless crime merits an unsuspecting victim. but oh the telling! what power of observation! what insight! bravura! alack.

this summer's been a bit of a daze. it's not the sort of thing that you really remember, but i remember waking up in the night last night and summarily declaring my confusion. and nineties again this weekend.

HOW TO CONDUCT AN ARTISTIC CORRESPONDENCE FOR THE LATER STIMULATION OF BACKLIST SALES; or, ON THE DANGERS OF PARASOMNIAS

dear poop lady:

it only took seeing your piece of mail on the entryway table to rush to a response. of course it was yours, because of the color. not that they're always the same color, but they're colored. this one is green. and all the better for it having been on top of a red one, not even in my pile, found, because of the color and the way you type my name, after the quick but petulant disappointment of seeing nothing in the box. your letter in another person's pile. "then at last the power of the mind to quit the body is manifest, and perhaps we fear or hate or wish annihilated this phantom of ourselves." but there's a third set of feet in that kiddie pool you drew, and perhaps... no need to prise an invitation if you've sent the drawing, probably, is what you're trying to say? not to sound too mawkish (which i love sounds like maudlin and means the same thing so reassures me about why it's called double u, and i know you appreciate that). a whiskey sour doesn't sound bad either, although july has been more sober than not and that's not entirely because of the sickness, although i have been sick and that's why i missed all three of your shows which must have made you wonder i'd hope, and i hope that you understand because you sent that mail. i haven't read it.

but of course i'll marry you.

love,

christopher