Back in high school and college, a trip to the Columbia Gorge wasn’t really about appreciating its beauty, but about getting away to party and make mischief, which we naturally did with some frequency. In the process, though, I did manage to discover a lot of favorite spots, surprisingly few of which I’ve forgotten in [...]
In an earlier post, I wrote about the ongoing renovation of the Edith Green-Wendell Wyatt Federal building, a bland 1970′s-looking hulk being completely retrofitted under the stimulus bill. Currently, it’s one of three cranes left in a skyline that had more than a dozen just a few years ago, one stands idly over a project [...]
I was a little worried, as I prepared to head to the waterfront to assemble for Occupy Portland; I had just gotten an email from Daily Kos asking me to “pledge” to occupy, and it said I would be joining 37 other hardy souls. “Really?” my friend Denise asked, “there’s only going to be 37 [...]
Today, when I wasn’t really planning to write anything, I got an invitation to a birthday house party by the Obama campaign. My first thought was, “Wait a minute, these guys know it’s my birthday? That NSA spying has gotten really out of hand….” Unfortunately, the truth is even worse: I’m invited to a “house” [...]
I went up to the penthouse today to do a couple of paint touch-ups, and it was looking so nice after the owners’ Herculean organizing efforts over the weekend that I thought I ought to take some pictures. (For before and during pictures, search “penthouse” in archives, and everything should come up…) This is the [...]
When I was Production Manager for Ballet Oregon back in the late 80′s, the company was in a sort of death spiral, which predictably ended in a merger of our company with the larger Pacific Ballet Theatre shortly after I left. To draw needed ticket revenue (and touring gigs in the hinterlands), struggling ballet companies [...]
Ever since this song came out in 1996, it’s always found its way onto my winter playlist because, cockeyed optimist that I am, I always believe that “this year will be better than the last,” and with that and the right amount of alcohol, I find this somewhat mournful song cheery. Some background… In December [...]
The FBI’s littlest terrorist, 19-year old Mohamed Mohamud, is apparently being represented by some pretty good lawyers to defend him in his open-and-shut entrapment case; they’ve loudly and appropriately told, in no uncertain terms, Attorney General Eric Holder to shut his lying pie-hole. From this morning’s Oregonian: Mohamed Mohamud’s defense team has asked a federal [...]
Back in the early 1990′s, the Portland Art Museum bought its next door neighbor, the Masonic Temple, for future expansion. There was some debate about what to do with the imposing 1928 structure, which had been modeled on the Temple of Halicarnassus by architect Fredrick Fritsch and dwarfed Pietro Belluschi’s 1933 original museum to its [...]
Yesterday I found myself, for a split second, succumbing to irrational fear, and it reminded me of the potency of this primal feeling, as well as why Republicans rely on it so much. It defies logic, it overrides rationality, and it evokes reflexive action out of all proportion to the real world circumstances. What happened [...]