Richmond Fontaine is a four-piece alternative country band based in Portland, Oregon. Like Franz Ferdinand or Jethro Tull, the band is named after a real person but their namesake was not famous prior to being adopted by the band.
John Dworkin at Blurt says, “A few of the songs on ‘Freeway’ deserve special mention and ‘Lonnie’ is one of them. Its crackling distorted rhythm guitars throwing off sparks, detailed melodic hooks, and attention to dynamics recalls Shawn Colvin’s ‘Get Out Of This House,’ but with more of the rough edges left in.”
I’d compare the song “Lonnie” to several by Drive-By Truckers, but it’s funny because no other track on the album sounds like “Lonnie.” What the other songs do have is plenty of story. In fact, Willy Vlautin’s dark, story-like songwriting, has helped the band achieve critical acclaim at home and across Europe.
Vlautin is also an author of two novels, with a third on the way. Here’s a promotional video for his new book, Lean On Pete, due in April in the U.S.
YaelMeyer is an independent singer-songwriter-multi instrumentalist based in Los Angeles. Her recently released EP entitled Heartbeat was recorded in Los Angeles and produced by Bill Lefler and includes guest appearances by Danny Levin on trumpet, Fil Krohnengold on acoustic guitar and accordion and Joseph Karnes on bass.
Here’s a track from the new EP, “Shed Their Fear,” performed with her friend Chanie Kravitz.
Meyer’s EP is available now on Amazon and iTunes. My favorite track on the five-song effort is “Favorite Two.” It’s a very pretty track, in a flowery, alpine valley-in-summer kind of way. And sometimes that’s just what a person wants to hear on a rainy day.
How has the Internet changed the way you think? That’s a huge question for our time and it’s the question Edge.org put in front on 167 world-class scientists, artists, and creative thinkers. Their range of answers is a deep well that one can dip into time and again, like a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
To get a taste for some of the thinking, please sample these small bits…
Crap detection — Hemingway’s name for what digital librarians call credibility assessment — is another essential literacy. If all schoolchildren could learn one skill before they go online for the first time, I think it should be the ability to find the answer to any question and the skills necessary to determine whether the answer is accurate or not.
The Internet pushes us all toward the immediate. The now. Every inquiry is to be answered right away, and every fact or idea is only as fresh as the time it takes to refresh a page.
And as a result, speaking for myself, the Internet makes me mean. Resentful. Short-fused. Reactionary.
In fact the propensity of the Internet to diminish our attention is overrated. I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind.
We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
If we know anything about knowledge, about innovation, and therefore about coming up with big deep thoughts, it is that it is cumulative, an accretive process of happening upon, connecting, and assembling, like an infinite erector set, not just a few pretty I-beams strewn about on a concrete floor.
Back in the mid-1700s, Samuel Johnson observed that there were two kinds of knowledge: that which you know, and that which you know where to get. The Internet has changed our thinking, but if it is to be a change for the better, we must add a third kind of knowledge to Johnson’s list — the knowledge of what matters. Knowing what matters is more than mere relevance. It is the skill of asking questions that have purpose, that lead to larger understandings.
This shock of inclusion, where professional media gives way to participation by two billion amateurs (a threshold we will cross this year) means that average quality of public thought has collapsed; when anyone can say anything any time, how could it not? If all that happens from this influx of amateurs is the destruction of existing models for producing high-quality material, we would be at the beginning of another Dark Ages.
So it falls to us to make sure that isn’t all that happens.
Of course, we all have our own essays to write.
I started using a computer to type up my college papers in 1983. But it wasn’t until 1995 that I started using email and even then, I used it sparingly. For me, 1997 was the year when the information revolution swept me up in its fast moving tide. Which means I’ve only been thinking inside this particular framework of networked machines for 13 years. Fundamentally, has it altered the way my brain works? I don’t know, but I do know my habits have changed radically. While I read fewer books now, my overall volume of reading and writing (and thinking) has increased dramatically. I now spend many hours almost every day reading, writing and thinking. I’d like to think that’s a good thing, although I’m keenly aware of the need for balance.
More than a century of industrial use has resulted in Willamette River sediments being contaminated with many hazardous substances, such as heavy metals, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), dioxin/furans, and pesticides. This far-from-green reality led a 10-mile stretch of the Willamette to be classified as a Superfund site by the Environmental Protect Agency in 2000.
This month Oregon Business is running a feature on the Superfund situation. It’s a topic all civic-minded Portlanders need to get up to speed on, because our economic future is tied directly to our willingness and ability to clean up the river and put sustainable practices into place.
As with most things, we need to know our history if we’re going to find a route out of the mess we’re in and refrain from repeating past mistakes.
Portland was built on the Willamette River, and the city’s 150-year history has forever altered that body of water. The West Coast’s first navigation channel enabled timber and grain exports starting in the 1850s. The railroad followed in the 1880s. After a lull during the Depression years, the harbor shifted into full gear during World War II, as workers built Liberty Ships for the Navy and rail cars for the Soviet Union.
Since the war years, healthy business clusters have developed in international trade, ship repair and metals manufacturing. Little thought was given to the ecological health of the river until the 1970s, when Gov. Tom McCall campaigned against pollution in the Willamette and spearheaded efforts to clean up Oregon’s defining waterway. But by then much of the damage had been done. It was just a matter of time before the pollution bill came due.
Oregon Business does a nice job of showing readers just how large that bill is. According to a 2008 report paid for by the Portland Development Commission, failing to redevelop key harbor properties such as the Arkema site over the next 10 years could cost the region $320 million in investment, $81 million in annual payroll and 1,450 jobs.
Cleaning up the toxic messes along the river is not easy nor inexpensive, a fact that’s contributing to the slow pace of progress. Hard choices need to be made and compromises struck between competing interests.
Steve Gunther, an environmental contractor who resigned from the harbor’s Community Advisory Group in frustration, says, “This is a billion-dollar project with no timeframe, no budget, no vision and no accountability.â€
Gunther calls Superfund process “a jobs program for lawyers, lab rats and consultants.”
The Oregonian says the cleanup effort could commence in 2013, with the cost potentially totaling $1 billion or more for industry, landowners, and sewer and utility ratepayers. It’s likely to involve hundreds of landowners past and present, and some of the state’s top industrial employers, from Schnitzer Steel to Siltronic.
I don’t see how Portland could have a more critical issue on its plate. We’re a river city and a city with a lot of unrealized ideals about how business and environmental needs can coexist. The thing is we’re not in a lab in a school. Portland is the lab and we can either get it right and prosper, or get it wrong and dissolve in a toxic stew of our own making.
Portland author Donald Miller has some thoughts on New Year’s resolutions.
I’ve discovered something better than resolutions. If you’ve read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, you know I’ve reorganized my life into stories rather than goals. I don’t have any problem with goals. I like goals and still set them. But without an overarching plot, goals don’t make sense and are hard to achieve. A story gives a goal a narrative context that makes sense to the brain, making them more likely to actually be achieved.
A story involves a person that wants something and is willing to overcome conflict to get it. If you plan a story this year, instead of just simple goals, your life will be more exciting, more meaningful and more memorable. And you are much more likely to stick to your goals. For instance, rather than saying I want to finish getting into shape this year, I’ve written down that I want to climb Mt. Hood with a couple friends. I have a vision of standing on top of the mountain in May, taking pictures and all that. Now my goal has a narrative context.
Narrative context is good. One of my goals is to be a better friend this year. But that’s kind of vague, isn’t it?
My goal needs specifics if I’m going to work my plan successfully. Specifically, I need to back off this tap tap tap medium that’s become so central to our lives, and actually call my friends on the phone and then make plans to go see them!
People tend to think of South Florida, and The Everglades in particular, as a swamp. But it’s not a swamp. It’s a massive river system that begins near Orlando with the Kissimmee River, which discharges into the vast but shallow Lake Okeechobee. Water leaving the lake in the wet season forms a slow-moving river 60 miles wide and over 100 miles long, flowing southward across a limestone shelf to Florida Bay at the southern end of the state.
Last week Darby, my mom and I got to see the river up close in the Shark Valley section of Everglades National Park. The river and what’s in it—birds, alligators, turtles and fish, all easily visible despite the throngs of camera-toting international tourists. Darby kept a handwritten record in her notebook of the scores of endangered wood storks, the anhingas drying their wings, pied-billed grebes moving through the water, blue herons and egrets fishing, and roseate spoonbills on the wing.
We also learned that Everglades National Park, established in 1947, is the third largest national park in the lower 48 states, covering 1.5 million acres. And that the sup-tropical region is home to six distinct habitats: hammock, mangrove, pineland, sawgrass, slough, and marine.
The Everglades is a great place to reconnect with nature, but the ecosystem is also the sole source of drinking water for more than six million people in South Florida. Hence, the idea that The Everglades needs protective care, now more than ever, is without question.
Contact Friends of the Everglades, the environmental group founded by writer and Everglades activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas in 1969. Or reach out to Everglades Foundation, another group doing important work in the area.
For the past four years I’ve been keeping track of the various trips I take during the year as a way to celebrate (and make note of) the people and places I had the good fortune to visit.
This year I spent at least one night in the following places (other than at home in Portland, OR):
Activists seeking “Climate Justice” have been methodically protesting in Copenhagen during the two-week U.N.-sponsored summit on climate change, in order to push delegates and leaders toward real solutions instead of the usual rhetoric-filled nothingness.
According to The New York Times, the protests went from peaceful to heated today.
In Wednesday’s demonstrations, protesters began massing north of the center shortly before noon and pressed into a tight line of riot police blocking access to the hall. Some of the officers wielded truncheons against the chanting, shoving protesters in a close-order scrum. After forcibly removing protesters from a truck parked in an intersection outside the Bella Center, police in blue vans kept moving the protesters backwards, nearly pushing some into a watery marsh.
As the police vans advanced, skirmishes broke out with protesters who formed human chains and chanted their commitment to nonviolence and to helping people in parts of the world that they said would be hardest hit by climate change. A number of protesters encouraged individual groups to keep pushing against the police.
Apparently, 250 people were arrested today in these “skirmishes” with police. Like the protests around the WTO meetings in Seattle and elsewhere, it’s a hard core minority that seeks to escalate the confrontation. But I don’t believe anti-capitalist sentiment is a minority opinion. People are tired of powerful interests simply running people into the ground.
Mette Hermansen, 27, studying to train teachers, and a member of the International Socialists of Denmark, told the Times, “In the Bella Center they are not discussing solutions to climate change. They are discussing how rich countries can continue emitting and how to sell that to the public. We are not preventing leaders from making solutions but encouraging them to make solutions.â€
Bonus click: I also wrote about “Hopenhagen,” the U.N.’s effort to rebrand the famous Danish city during the Conference, on AdPulp.
The title, “Evenstad’s Island,” clearly hints at what’s to come in the article. While the Willamette Valley winery puts out highly-rated wine, the owners, Ken and Grace Evenstad, suffer from a damaged reputation. They’re seen as wealthy hobbyists from Minnesota and are said to be totally removed from the local wine-producing community.
For instance:
“Ken and Grace have been quoted as saying they’re responsible for the entire wine industry and winemaking techniques going back to Jesus,” says Harry Peterson-Nedry, founder of nearby Chehalem Winery in Newberg. “And that’s probably not far from what they believe.â€
Indeed, both Ken and Grace Evenstad say that what differentiates their wines is unique methodology and an unusually high attention to detail. They insist on dry farming — meaning they do not use irrigation — because this method produces stronger tap roots and healthier vines. They also strive for a very low yield: around 1.78 tons of grapes per acre (the industry standard is 2 to 2.5). And they do 4-5 hand passes per year through the vineyard, green pruning, removing small clusters so the larger, robust ones have more space and food to grow.
Domaine Serene ferments each grape separately — not only according to the type but also by growing conditions such as elevation, direction and amount of sunlight — which means working with more than 200 individual Pinot Noir fermentations. Domain Serene also ages all its wines on-site for at least 15 months. According to the Evenstads, this combination of world-class winemaking practices was unprecedented when they arrived in the region 20 years ago. And they claim to have developed a unique system for making white wine (“Coeur Blancâ€) from mature red grapes. Others in the region scoff.
“This kind of wine was made by an Italian producer long before it was made by Domaine Serene,†says Ken Wright, the Evenstads’ original winemaker who worked with them for their first 10 years. “If you like, I can send you the link to prove it.†(He did, and it did.)
Sadly, the story doesn’t end there.
In September, the news broke that the Evenstads were suing Tony Rynders — the man who worked as their principal winemaker from 1998 to 2008 and created many of their most highly rated wines — for leaving their employ with proprietary information, especially pertaining to the methods for making Coeur Blanc.
Rynders would not comment because the case is still under way. But others in the community are avid to speak on Rynders’ behalf. Ken Wright, for instance. He insists the Evenstads’ lawsuit is simply a battle for power. “It’s typical of Ken and Grace,†Wright says. “Look at it this way. They just celebrated their 20th anniversary in business and nobody was there who helped them make wine for the past 20 years. I actually kind of feel for them.â€
Of course, the great irony here is that Domain Serene is well known outside the state for carrying the flag for Oregon pinot. “Only Oregonians want to strip them of their status,” notes Ann Bauer, the Seattle-based journalist who wrote the story.
Garage a Trois pulled into Portland last night prepared to showcase songs from their new album, Power Patriot, and to win over fans not yet accustom to the band’s new lineup (Charlie Hunter left Garage to focus on his own band and his family in 2007).
After playing shows with Robert Walter and John Medeski, the group finally melded with keyboard impresario, Marco Benevento. By all accounts the music is heavier now, but I didn’t hear anyone at Doug Fir Lounge last night complain. By my estimate Garage played in an inspired performance. I know I visited some intergalactic destinations I hadn’t seen in awhile on the strength of the band’s contemporary improv.
Here’s what JamBase is saying about the new lineup:
While I immensely enjoyed and appreciated the Garage A Trois from the first half of this decade, I honestly feel this lineup and sound is what Garage A Trois was meant to be and what will take them to the next level. While the former Garage A Trois’ sound felt more rooted in cross-cultural, past musical traditions, the new sound feels current and even futuristic.
Only these four musicians—in their perfect storm of cosmic improv energy—could manage to make dark industrial jazz sound lighthearted (“Rescue Spreaders”) and conjure perfectly danceable freakout swing (“Fragile”), and that’s just the first two tracks of Power Patriot.
In an interesting twist of fate, Charlie Hunter played Mississippi Studios last night, just a few miles away from the East Burnside basement where his former cohorts were reaching for the outer limits.
