We were seated in the top row of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Wednesday night for Wilco, but that didn’t stop us from getting a good taste of opening act White Denim’s 1970s-drenched rock and roll stew.
The band from Austin, Texas has been kicking it old school since 2006. I don’t mean to limit the band’s range with that statement. The 1970s was an expansive time in rock music, and White Denim is a band busy stretching the limits of what they can do with their dub, psychedelic, prog rock, blues, punk, jazz and soul influences.
Let’s listen:
Last May, White Denim released their fourth studio album D on Downtown Records. Like me, you can listen to it now on Spotify.
The band, which reminds me of Portland-based Blitzen Trapper, also makes their music available on SoundCloud.
If you’d like to read about Wilco’s performance, Willamette Week, The Oregonian’s Ryan White and the band itself, have the beat covered. Although none of those sources mention the state of affairs in rock and roll today. That’s work best left to the blogger.
It cost $110, including fees, for two tickets to Wilco with White Denim on the bill. The Schnitz closed down their alcohol sales by the fourth song of Wilco’s long set for reasons I do not comprehend. Also, the hall itself needs to be outfitted for sound. There was just one hanging stack of speakers above the stage, and that’s not sufficient for the two thousand of people in the balcony.
For a Gentile, Scott Carrier knows a lot about Mormons, having lived most of his 50-plus years in Salt Lake City. Carrier’s new book is titled Prisoner of Zion, which interestingly is something he’s perfectly willing (and happy) to be. The place does have a magnetic pull, no question about it.
His book of stories weaves tales of home with tales from Carrier’s adventures in war torn countries on the other side of the world. Both carry weight, but I particularly like his take on Utah and Mormon culture. I also think Carrier’s timing is good, as the closer Mitt Romney gets to the White House, the more people will want to know about the Latter Day Saints.
In “Inside the Momosphere” Carrier describes how when he was eight years old, his LDS friends told him about being baptized in the Mormon temple, and what it meant.
They told me they’d been baptized in the temple and now they were going to a different heaven than I was, unless I converted. They said there are three levels of heaven and they were going to the highest one, the Celestial Kingdom, but the best I could hope for was the second level, the Terrestrial Kingdom, which isn’t a bad place, just not the best place.
To reach the Celestial Kingdom is to become god-like yourself. So, you can see why Mormons have had, and continue to have, an adversarial relationship with people of other faiths. No one wants to be told their version of heaven, which they’re presently making great strides to reach, is second class.
And class is a campaign issue this year. Thanks to the wealth he has amassed, Romney’s life on earth is a bit finer than most Americans will ever know. But it doesn’t stop there, it’s not just about money. Because Romney is by all accounts, “a good Mormon,” he’s also headed for a better afterlife, one where he will achieve godliness, and I have to think that’s a problem, politically speaking.
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At the end of the book, in a piece called, “Najibullah in America,” Carrier endeavors to describe the American-centric world view held by many Mormon students in his classes at Utah Valley University in Orem. For these students, there simply is no separation between church and state. No need.
Jesus Christ created the United States of America by raising up our founding fathers and guiding their hand in writing the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Once protections for religious freedom were in place, Jesus directed Joseph Smith to found an entirely new religion, restoring the true gospel, and begin building the Kingdom of God on Earth in preparation for His Second Coming.
That’s right, the pilgrims were just laying the groundwork for the intergalactic super show to be orchestrated, like a radio program, from Temple Square. But more importantly, America is for Jesus. Literally. When He comes back, He’s coming back to the America. So, naturally we must protect America at all costs from infidels, and keep funding the military at insane levels, which is a plank in the Romney campaign.
I know a lot of Jack Mormons, people who’ve thrown off the faith. I also know some good Mormons. They’re good people and I don’t want to see the kind of misunderstandings that might occur in this election season around religion. For instance, some conservative Christians, notably Southern Baptists, won’t admit the Mormons into the Christian brotherhood. Yet, Mormons are “busy building the Kingdom of God on Earth in preparation for His Second Coming.”
It may seem unfair to bring a man’s religion in to the campaign, but one’s ideas are often shaped by one’s faith. Therefore, it’s not just fair game, it is an essential part of considering where the person is coming from. Romney was a Mormon missionary in France. He knocked on doors in a Catholic nation that loves wine and sex. He knows what rejection looks like, which is good.
He also believes he’s living a righteous life, but it’s hard to know for sure if he is or isn’t. Just this morning he said he really doesn’t care all that much about the poor. He meant he wants to appeal to the middle class, but it didn’t come out that way. It came out like he’s callous and out of touch. The thing I wonder about is if it’s not all his fault, because a sense of superiority appears to be baked right into his cosmology.
[UPDATE] Reciting verses from The Bible this morning, President Obama responded to Romney’s comments about the poor, without having to call out Romney by name. He’s also clearly saying to Romney’s team and to the nation that he, President Obama, will be the good Christian in this race, thank you very much.
I lit up this morning when reading an article in the pages of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab.
The article describes the inner workings of AllNovaScotia.com, a startup business journal in Canada’s largest Maritime Province that charges a healthy $360 a year for access to content. From what I can tell there is no free version.
AllNovaScotia has 5,950 subscribers, whose monthly dues generate 80 per cent of its revenue. Three people with different email addresses can share a $30 a month subscription, but they can’t pass the stories on to anyone else without some effort. The publication — produced by a staff of 14, 11 of them reporters — is locked down in Flash, making sharing usually a cumbersome ordeal of cobbling together screenshots. No sharing buttons here.
A focus on people and their wealth makes AllNovaScotia a different beast from typical business coverage that focuses on companies. People’s names are bolded in stories, frequently paired with their corporate compensation and the assessed value of their house. An almost-daily feature is Who’s Suing Whom.
Lots of things to consider here. Work your niche, and offer somewhat lurid content if you want people to covet it and pay for it (AllNoviaScotia is published by David Bentley, who co-founded a gossip publication called Frank Magazine in the 1980s).
The other thing is don’t hesitate to charge for content, once you’ve determined how best to serve your audience. “You can’t be in the content business and not get paid for it,” Bentley says. Emphasis on business.
All of which leads me think how we might modify AdPulp’s editorial product so it doesn’t compete with the trades or other ad blogs, but delivers the perfect mix of stories and images that ad pros will gladly pay for. Like photos of themselves sunning in Cannes and gossip about who is sleeping with whom back in Manhattan and Santa Monica. Plus, the dish on which creative directors are total assholes, and which producers are the most fun to party with on location.
Of course, there’s just one small problem with my plan. I won’t put out a pub just for money. Yet, there is clearly a way to offer the meaty substance that real journalists cook up and industry cocktail chatter in the same vehicle. Sounds like AllNoviaScotia has it figured out, and I imagine many other niche and regional publishers are about to discover the right approach, as well. Because “You can’t be in the content business and not get paid for it.”
At the end of 2006, I started doing yearly recaps of my travels. From 2006-08 I was traveling for work a lot, so the lists were rather lengthy. Since, migrating to Oregon in 2008 we’ve been keeping it much closer to home. In fact, in 2011 I flew to Boston and back and that’s it. All other travel was by car.
Moclips, WA
Brownsville, OR
Enterprise, OR
Walla Walla, WA
Zigzag, OR
Madison, NH
Franklin, MA
Boston, MA
Government Camp, OR
Our Valentine’s Day trip to the Washington Coast was one rich with discovery. We found an old seaside lodge with a great restaurant in Moclips, which is basically the end of the road in west central Washington.
Additionally, we took our maiden voyage to Walla Walla in 2011. Walla Walla, as you may know, is Washington’s Napa Valley. We also found our way to the charming hamlets Enterprise and Joseph, Oregon in the NE corner of the state. It’s good to know these kind of “last best places” still exist.
My buddy DK was here in Portland for the holidays. While dining at Zeus Cafe, he suggested that we could collaborate on a novel based on our experiences touring with Grateful Dead in the 1980s and 1990s. I like the idea a lot, and think the addition of a writing partner for this project would be particularly beneficial, as it will require much memory jogging and just as much vivid imagination.
DK, for his part, has his collection of hand-assembled Road Logs available for inspection (no small thing, considering DK and Anina’s house burned down a number of years ago). I too have some primary source materials to help ground the story in place and time. I also have the beginnings of a story written out in decades old drafts. My protagonist, Cody Timberlake of Salt Lake City, is a fan of the band and a pot-dealing ski bum with an East Coast education and beautiful friends.
Where might we take this character and the story now? To make a great novel, we need to adhere to the classic arch of a story and develop the necessary tension (plot twists) that holds it all together, before resolving with either a heartbreaking or heartwarming scene at the end. Naturally, we want to draw on the many real experiences we had during this ten-plus year period. In fact, I’m eager to simply record many of my true stories so they don’t fade into nothingness. Already too many years have passed, and that’s no doubt already changing the way we remember things and how we will present them. However, from a literary perspective, I feel that the distance we now have from these events will help us immensely. DK and I are not Tom Wolfe. We weren’t there as observers. And a composite view pieced together from many accounts, versus us relying on just our personal narratives, will likely present a more accurate picture of the time, the people and events.
For fun (and to prime the pump), I’d like to share one true Grateful Dead story with you now…
Deadheads are notorious for packing hotel rooms to well beyond capacity. After all, eight people in a room–four on the beds and four on the floor–is the more affordable way to travel. Of course, these configurations don’t exactly favor the hotel, and every once in a while we’d run in to some problems with irate staff.
After a show in Oakland one fine night, me and six or so of my friends, walk from the Coliseum to the nearby Hampton Inn where we are staying. At the front door of the hotel we are confronted, as is every guest, with a barricade and two hotel employees charged with the task of letting just two people per room enter the premises. That we had already checked in, paid in advance, moved in to the room itself, had all our gear up there, etc. didn’t mean a thing to these security stiffs.
I say, “Let me get this right, we check in to your fleabag hotel, go out on the town for the night and now we face a martial law situation at the entrance to the hotel?”
“Two people per room,” repeats the stiff.
I whisper to my friends, “let’s go, they’re not stopping us.” I pass the barricade with its insulting sign-in list, and my friends follow my block to the elevator area in the lobby and up we go. No one follows us, we go about our evening like the semi-normal people we are. But this whole thing is under my skin now. I’m pissed now.
In the morning I wake up, take a shower, put on my best outfit and head down to the lobby. “I’d like to speak to the manager.” He comes to the front and asks what he can do for me. I ask if we can speak in private. He escorts me back to his office. I sit down and begin to question him on last night’s theatrics. He says, “You don’t understand these people.” Long pause. “It’s one thing after the next with these people. Did you know they wash their clothes in the hot tub?”
He doesn’t see me as one of them. I don’t say anything, I just shoot scorn daggers at him with my eyes. Now he sees me. Now he says, “Hold it, you’re one of them. Screw you! You are out of here.”
I pull a piece of flattened cardboard from my pocket. The table tent I brought with me from the room says if I am not 100% satisfied with my stay at Hampton Inn my stay is free. I tell the harried manager I am not even 10% satisfied, as I toss the chain’s cardboard promise onto his otherwise orderly desk.
He stands and so do I. We head head back to the public front desk area, where the manager counts out and returns all the cash we had given up for a four night stay.
“Now get out,” he tells me.
“Gladly.”
I go back upstairs and report to my friends on the happenings below. We quickly pack up after our free night and head down to street to the Oakland Airport Hilton, where the staff have all read Conrad Hilton’s book on hospitality, Be My Guest. It’s actually the start of a long and grateful relationship with this particular Hilton property and Hilton in general. On the other hand, I haven’t stayed in a Hampton Inn room since (even though Hilton acquired the chain in 1999).
The second season of IFC’s Portlandia airs this Friday. The show is much anticipated in Puddletown and beyond.
Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen — the show’s stars — have been out “doing press” for the show. Thanks to the deeply sarcastic nature of the program and its willingness to skewer hipsters over an open fire, The New Yorker is biting. In a sweeping article by Margaret Talbot we learn about Brownstein’s childhood in the Seattle suburbs, how she rocked hard in Olympia’s riot-grrrl scene and how she eventually moved to Portland and tried her hand a day job in advertising.
Brownstein said working at Wieden + Kennedy proved alienating, because of the way “the work mimics art.” Ouch.
Another interesting reveal in The New Yorker piece is this bit on the so-not-Hollywood writer’s room:
For the second season, Bill Oakley, a former head writer for “The Simpsons” who had moved to Portland, has helped out on the show. He says, “I’ve spent a lot of time in writers’ rooms. They’re pressure cookers. In most cases, they’re heavily male. You work long hours and many of the people in them have a really negative view about themselves and life.” The “Portlandia” writers’ room, however, is collaborative and laid-back. Some meetings have been held in the loft of the director Gus Van Sant, who has become friendly with Brownstein. “Gus’s dog was wandering in and out,” Oakley says. “There was a microbrewery downstairs.”
Answer me this…where in Portland is there not a microbrewery downstairs?
[UPDATE] The dynamic duo appeared Thursday on “Fresh Air” with host Terry Gross on NPR. Listen in.
Author and consultant, Joseph Grenny, writing in Business Week, sees a future where we learn to manage our internet addictions with the help of technology.
Smartphones, tablets, MP3 players, GPS-enabled gadgets, and ubiquitous Internet access will continue to feed and exploit the natural human proclivity toward immediate gratification. In 2012, we’ll become more acutely aware of the degree to which our lives feel more virtual than real—and our relationships, pleasures, and aspirations seem shorter-term and shallower.
While some will try to stave off these effects by taking Luddite oaths to eschew technology, others will create solutions that help us make electronic tools our slaves, not masters. Offerings that allow us to shut off texting in moving cars (Text Zapper, for one) or voluntarily block our own impulsive access to IMs and Internet surfing (Freedom and Anti-Social, for example) signify our realization that we are behaving in ways we don’t like. As the gap between gratification and happiness gets larger, entrepreneurs will step in and provide solutions.
At lunch today, I was thinking there was a time not so long ago when we were fully present at lunch. Our phones wouldn’t ring because there was no phone. There was lunch and if one was alone, maybe a book or newspaper to pass the time. Not now. Even if no one calls, someone could call, text or IM and that possibility changes the mood in the room.
Personally, I think we need more than a suite of Apps to solve the growing distraction problem. Maybe daily meditation and a reorganization of one’s day into digital and non-digital segments. I know I am seeking a better balance this year. Without this balance, one can fall through the Web’s portal to another time and place, like Alice through the looking glass. Clearly, there’s much to be fascinated with in world within a world, but it’s not the real world and right now the real world needs some work. Don’t you think?
Portland Mayor Sam Adams is not running for re-election, but he is working hard to do the job Portlanders hired him to do.
For one, Adams wants Portland to be “the scrappiest small global city in the United States.” That means exports, among other things. “Even without a coherent regional strategy or partnership, Greater Portland ranks second in the nation in export value as a percentage of our economy,” says Adams.
Here’s a look at one Portland-based company actively participating in the global economy:
Portland Development Commission has loads of video segments on YouTube that help to paint the city’s business environment in a positive light.
Here’s one that showcases the city’s attractiveness to startups:
For more information on the progress being made on several important fronts, see these Progress Reports from the Mayor’s office.
Lawyer and Democratic state Sen. Suzanne Bonamici is competing against Republican business consultant Rob Cornilles for Oregon’s 1st Congressional district seat (vacated by sex scandal-ridden David Wu).
This is what Bonamici and Cornilles look like on TV, which is where most 1st district citizens voting in the Jan. 31 special election will see them:
The 1st district is considered the economic engine of Oregon, according to KATU. It includes downtown Portland and suburban Washington County where Nike and Intel hold fort. The district which stretches to the Pacific Coast is also home to much of Oregon wine country.
Are you suffering from Information Age blues? Drowning in data with no time or inclination to sort through it all? You are not alone.
“The issue nowadays is to some extent the need for good filters, pushing away information after centuries of seeking it,” writes Quentin Hardy, Deputy Tech Editor of The New York Times.
Hardy attended a lecture in Berkeley last week by Harvard’s David Weinberger. Weinberger’s new book, Too Big To Know grapples in part with the problem of too much information. Weinberger also believes that “the Web’s ever-changing structure of links undermines hierarchical analysis by allowing everyone to see and contribute different points of view.”
Since Aristotle, there has been at least lip service to the idea of teleology, a process of discovery that leads to greater and greater understanding. We have invested much of our society in making such a process better.
Now, he said, the model of a protean, ever-linked and ever-changing world is killing that. “The dream of the West has been that we will live together in knowledge, that there is One Knowledge. The Web is saying ‘Nice try,'” Mr. Weinberger said. By its very success we know that “the Internet as a medium is far more like the world we live in” and “the Web is closer to the phenomenological truth of our lives,” he said.
Weinberger responded to Hardy’s article with a post of his own. For one, he thinks the headline in the Times piece is misleading.
“I don’t think the Net is ruining everything, and I am (overall) thrilled to see how the Net is transforming knowledge.”
I shared Hardy’s writeup with my friend DK, who is a professor of philosophy. DK wrote back to say the writer “should have mentioned Nietzsche. This article focuses on epistemology–but there are also social issues involved.”
Detailing one such social issue, DK says it is “interesting to note how the students’ writing skills have plummeted in the last several years. They write in sentence fragments with no command of American English–like they’re sending text messages.”
Which goes to this increasingly difficult issue at the heart of the too much information problem: Who has time to think? When the volume of information is pumping at full throttle, and you are gaming on one large screen, while using a desktop, laptop, tablet and/or phone for other tasks, there’s no time to read or write and no time for measured reflection.
DK is right to be concerned about the deterioration of basic communication skills in his students. And I am right to be concerned that I read fewer books that I once did. Why am I reading fewer books? Because the time I once reserved for reading text on paper is now given over to reading, writing and rearranging text on the screen. Plenty of thought and care go in to these acts, but where is the long arching story that requires deep concentration for hours and days on end? Where is the place in our hectic lives for the literary equivalent of the long walk in the woods? The answer is it is all available — the short form eBooks on every topic under the sun and the long form classics.
I think what our media abundance calls for is a greater degree of media literacy and also some personal restraint. It takes a disciplined reader to tackle Heidegger, Joyce, Yeats, Faulkner and the like. The reader must work for the pay off, as instant gratification, to say nothing of the game layer, is nowhere to be found.
