Some Details

I've been using Flickr lately to get some Creative Commons material. I thought I'd share this image that was made by AZRainman who has done many other fantastic images.

In other news, the highly anticipated New Year's Eve show hosted by the Banana Stand & Tech Offensive staring Deer Or The Doe & Tranquilazer is currently being set up. Be sure to check out the Tech Offensive website in the near future to get a free download of the show.

If you'd like to be added to the list for the show, send me an email and I'll let you know about the details, as well as future shows.

Some Real Talk

Thanks for reading this year. I'm trying to write honestly; hopefully I can continue to become a better writer. Be sure to check out my other blog and leave some love: ColourLovers

I leave you with my favorite video of 2007 - enjoy.

Martha Washington Was a Hip, Hip Lady

The Willamette Weekly recently published a story about Paul Stanford, a red cheeked, plump, boy-faced 40-year-old who has been fighting to keep medical-marijuana laws relatively libertarian in Oregon. Now before taking a moment to hastily praise Mr. Stanford for his contribution to an community of common sense and adult standards, you may want to read the entire article. Paul Stanford has been fighting to make marijuana legal all over the United States, but he may also be a bumbling idiot, or even a crook, maybe both. In any case, he has mismanaged his campaign and been careless with thousands of dollars worth of funds. Too bad for Paul Stanford.

The I.R.S. is definitely on Stanford’s ass. Illegal drugs, black markets, shady politics and crooked spies have always been a treasured part of Americana. We’re a nothing but the spawn of unstable wanderers, religious zealots, criminal runaways, and massacring bastards. We are dreamers, although misguided, scattered among the great expanse of a nation still splintered and haunted by the dimming cry of a people born when the mind expressed pure, physical emotion, amplified by indescribable sound and color. We do not put up with losers.

This is American, damn it! And more so, this is Portland. You can run a house of Thai teenage prostitutes who sew Nike soccer-balls during the day, but you cannot prevail with such an establishment without a clean, business oriented tax record. There are clubs where up-to-but-no-more-than 14 wet, drunk, sweaty, naked semi-strangers can participate in group sex or simple, wallflower masturbation. And if Paul Stanford had kept better track of his goddamn, illegal drug money then, as readers, we could have all taken a moment and thanked the Lord, in all his infinite mercy, for sending someone like Mr. Stanford into the waking world to crusade for a plant that grows from the holy ground. We, however tragic, cannot send out this simple prayer.

The laws governing the sale of marijuana have been destructively skewed for decades. Too bad for us. Too bad for the common man and woman. If you work shuffling papers and answering phones for a company that makes water-proof, industrial plumbing covers, then perhaps at the end of your 40-hour work week, plus 6-hour weekly traffic-fuck, you’d like to come home, smoke a giant bong of cancer-patient-strength pot, and giggle while playing video games. Or maybe you’ve cleaned the kitchen, bathrooms, and bedrooms, cooked dinner and finished laundry, then perhaps you’d like to puff a joint to make your skin more eager to touch before crawling in bed with a hairy, over-weight water-proof, industrial plumbing cover customer service agent. Maybe you do have cancer, and grass helps you eat and your nausea vanish. Maybe your job is nothing but hard, manual labor and weed makes you relax after a long day better than a six-pack of Coors Light. Maybe you have bad joints and smoking a bowl helps ease the tension. And maybe you’re a spoiled, over-privileged trust-fund baby, and you smoke pot because, fuck it, it gets you high. These are all equal.

If you’re an adult, you get to decide what makes you feel better at the end of the day, provided it doesn’t directly harm another individual. If it’s something as simple as a plant that only requires a small flame to use, then it’s an acceptable choice. Every action has a reaction, every wave a counter-balancing ripple, and every thought and movement made is carefully tagged with the phrase, “Use At Your Own Discretion.”

Colors of Portland

Resilient, alien greens growing on sleeping trees, almost as if the barren earth is being re-cultivated, the flip side of extinction, distant life hitchhiking in frozen stasis, smashing toward a slow, beautifully complex multi-tiered world. Oregon in December is a lingering gray mist that soon leaves at the early approaching night. Black nights, but neon candles from the buzzing city nestled in the hills set travelers through the suspended, blooming stars of Portland. The ever present background mixture of back-lit somber, soft light and clouds cause yellows, bright blues, orange, and red to strike the unfamiliar eye. An exciting place to discover color, like gems among mountain rock.

"A Tiger! In Africa?"

Resilient, alien greens growing on sleeping trees, almost as if the barren earth is being re-cultivated, the flip side of extinction, distant life hitchhiking in frozen stasis, smashing toward a slow, beautifully complex multi-tiered world. Oregon in December is a lingering gray mist that soon leaves at the early approaching night.

There are songs I can picked out that have structured my very being. There are bands that remind people of places, times, friends, enemies, lovers. And I’m sure there are those who are moved by music equally, or more than I am. For better and worse, these single pieces have contributed to my collective consciousness:
“Misunderstood” by Wilco
“Moonlight Mile” by The Rolling Stones
“The Party’s Crashing Us” by Of Montreal
“I Found a Reason” by Cat Power
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” by Bob Dylan
“Schizophrenia” by Sonic Youth
“Blue in Green” and “Right Off” by Miles Davis
“3rd Planet from the Sun” by Modest Mouse
“The Abandoned Hospital Ship” by The Flaming Lips
“Evaporated” by Ben Folds
“Are You Experienced?” by Jimi Hendrix
And somewhat embarrassingly, “Foolish Games” by Jewel, and “Love Will Keep Us Alive” by The Eagles, although each embarrassing for different reasons.

I could easily make a list for books, movies, vacations, and even people that have structured my life as well. I’m not saying my list is diverse, well established, or even completely accurate. What I am saying, however, is that it’s an interesting experiment to review the elements in your life that have helped to comprise the sentient body that is reading these words.

But more profound than, well, perhaps every other component combined, are the moments when the most basic of principles that frame our reality are solidified. The chemicals on the brain change, neurotransmitters indivisibly bind, leaving every cell resonating with knowledge. The understanding of the motion of the planet around its orbit, the sun, and the grand expanse of the universe is an example; another is life.

I remember grasping the fundamental motivation of life while laying in the grass on a cold, fall day in an northern Indiana park, equipped with an extraordinary girlfriend and a mixture of acid, weed and shrooms swimming in our head. Life grows. A lush, brilliant tree told me. The fact that such a simple principle had never fused to my consciousness in the past was astounding. Life grows. Life grows without concern for anything. It just keeps moving.

This fact has always comforted me. Nothing else suggests promise than the center of life. Maybe not yours or mine, our family, or our friends. Life is not very worried about distinction. We’re lucky. We’ve gotten to be a part of the journey.

Music: Portland's Hot-Hot Sex

Music is one of Portland’s most attractive features. A town with less than 600,000 people had the opportunity to choose between Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings or Prefuse 73 on the same Friday night. On Tuesday, the sister duo Tegan & Sara came to town, and just a week prior Brooklyn dance-rockers VHS or Beta commanded the stage. Dan Deacon, Steven Malkmus, Black Mountain, St. Vincent, Super Furry Animals, The Shins, Spoon, The Bad Plus, White Williams, The Minus 5, Born Ruffians, Holy Fuck, Nada Surf, The Mountain Goats, Caribou and more all have shows scheduled in the upcoming months. Cities like Chicago, New York, and L.A. are treated to many great performers in a short amount of time, millions of people are bound to sell tickets, but Portland is unique in its ability to foster several venues with a relatively small population.

With so many places and people to see one may wonder where to go and what to do.
The Doug Fir, coined “The Drug Fir” someone on the street once told me, is the ultimate modern, liberal, upper class, thick black glasses, hippie yet yuppie, hipster, pretentious, vogue, karma, trendy bullshit, and it’s great. VHS or Beta, along with The Moving Units, got an otherwise self-conscious audience to dance in the awkward, but still energetic manner. The Doug Fir is hosting several great shows in the next few months, the layout it great, the decor a bit annoying but posh, and the ticket prices low. The venue is also relative small, only 300 or so tickets for some shows. Older socialites will feel as if they’re still on the scene sitting upstairs by the fire, drinking and commenting on the rumble below. And concerts goers will feel as if they are extremely less cool for not working there, and worse for not even knowing someone that does.

The City of Roses has one of the highest gay and lesbian populations in America, which made selling out the Crystal Ballroom relatively easy for the sister duo Tegan & Sara. McMenamins owns several joints in the Portland area, the Crystal Ballroom’s downtown location and large hosting capabilities may make it their crown jewel. Unfortunately, the venue is simply too big, the stage too small, and the sound too hollow. Bigger acts like The Shins and Spoon are sold out, and sell out rather quickly, frustrating to anyone looking to actually see a band they’ve paid more than $30 to hear. As an added irritation, the crowd is sectioned off between those over and under 21, making it impossible to get drunk and still stand behind teenagers under 5'5'’. The screaming drunk 40 year-olds, however, will always be there.

The hippest club award goes to the Holocene. Located in the SE warehouse district, the club looks like all the other gray buildings expect for a small, softly green glowing sign tucked away in upper corner of the front door. Cool kids only. Prefuse 73 kicked the crowd into a groove on Friday night. Complete with a smoking room, the only real draw back to the club is the inability to get a drink without pushing. But if you can squeeze into an extra small, extra colorful tank top you may be able to pass off as one of the staff and make your own. Competition to get noticed depends on your wallet size and color of your Abercrombie skull-cap.

Washed Away, The Particle Sea

Lighting faced young mothers with their duckling children, complete with individual, miniature umbrellas framed by a beaded window. A sight on every street.

There is a fantastic sense that something here in Portland is going to burst clear through the pollution of rejected America and propel to some new land of infinite sharing and love. The more established residents seem to be split into two camps. One embraces the influx of young arms, legs and ideas. The other narrows eyes at the suspect naivety. Either way, the culture influences and adds to the creation of a protective bubble that permeates through the architecture and jackets, like the ceaseless moister enveloping the city. An army of children willing to devote a certain amount of their conscience to the progress of the world. The effect is a comfortable nook of local enhancement in nearly every sector of human desire. Yet, every individual no more than a part or a tool, working inside the great machine, making the surrounding mechanisms more efficient, clean, calm. I am one too.

The last time I wore Converse shoes they were tiger-stripped and glow-in-the-dark. Now I’ve accepted the uniform of black chucks, Jim Morrison tight jeans, and neatly fitted flannel shirts.
This type of thinking can cause you to sink into the self examination out on the edge of existential fear.

Yes, I know the Tombstone Blues. The most concrete decision is death. Far more distinct than the ambiguous world around, and certain. Oh, young, too young, and so many more interesting miles to go before I sleep, so many miles of strange structures and odd faces.
There is a quick fix for these pains, and Stumptown is scattered with couples clinging to a common, unattainable promise.

Unfortunately, I have yet to experience the softer side of Portland. Most of the women I meet are married or in high school. Lord, you leave me no choice. I will lead these eager bodies to the promise land. A community service, like giving your recycling to homeless people, or cleaning up highways after a D.U.I., revisiting Highway 61. Too damaged to lock down a worthy mate or too lost to worry about such matters? Who knows.

Portland I am here. Get ready.