NPR is running a story on cargo bikes that features two Portland companies in the cargo bike business—Metrofiets and Clever Cycles.
The piece also introduces Portland mom, Carie Weisenbach-Folz, who picks up her two kids, ages 5 and 2, from school. “But instead of loading them into the usual minivan, she’s uses a cargo bicycle.”
Try that in Dallas, Missy.
It’s interesting to note that the majority of Metrofiets’ customers aren’t families—they’re businesses. Metrofiets has built a custom cargo bicycle for a floor refinisher to carry his sander, and another for a brewery to transport their beer kegs. Phillip Ross of Metrofiets says businesses “can absolutely get rid of one of their fleet vehicles, and use one of these bikes, within a certain geographical area around their shop.”
Today, 750,000 Americans bike to work–a 50 percent jump since 2000. There are no estimates yet on the number of cargo bikes on the street.
Darby and I have been intently viewing seasons one through four of HBO’s The Wire (care of Netflix), which leaves just season five to go. I’m afraid we’re already dreading the end of the series. We don’t want it to end, the way you don’t want a great novel to end. But end it must.
In preparation for this coming conclusion of what one critic calls the “greatest TV show ever made,” I’ve begun searching for and processing the criticism.
Mark Bowden of The Atlantic called the show’s co-creator, David Simon, “the angriest man in television.” In an interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Simon says he doesn’t mind “being called that” and asks rhetorically if there’s a better response to the America of the last decade.
Bowden also makes note of the literary form advanced by The Wire.
Some years ago, Tom Wolfe called on novelists to abandon the cul-de-sac of modern “literary†fiction, which he saw as self-absorbed, thumb-sucking gamesmanship, and instead to revive social realism, to take up as a subject the colossal, astonishing, and terrible pageant of contemporary America. I doubt he imagined that one of the best responses to this call would be a TV program, but the boxed sets blend nicely on a bookshelf with the great novels of American history.
It’s a point well taken. I’ve often thought that Shakespeare, were he alive today, would be successful in Hollywood. It’s also interesting to understand Simon’s background as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. For 12 years the man told detailed, well researched, fact-filled stories, but those stories didn’t change policy in City Hall, Annapolis or Washington, DC. Simon isn’t holding his breath to see these changes come as a result of his TV show either. He sees the problems in America (like the failed War on Drugs that his show dramatizes) as systemic, and argues that conditions will have to become much worse before they get better.
Here, let’s listen to the man:
Simon says our economy doesn’t need the underclass, and that’s why these urban black communities have been pushed completely from the frame of American life. He’s right about the extreme marginalization, but I would counter that this nation does need the underclass and that poor, under-educated workers can become productive and change their station in life and possibly the country’s future in the process.
President Obama is conducting a “jobs summit” this week to help spur jobs training and jobs creation. In my opinion, we need to get off our collective ass now and institute a 1930s-style public works program. It doesn’t take a genius to see how much work there is to do. The nation’s roads and bridges need repairs and we must build high speed rail from Seattle to San Diego and from Miami to Boston. Moving to energy, the nation’s entire electrical grid needs to be refitted to store and conduct DC current produced by solar and wind. And the list goes on. Meanwhile, little progress is made.
In one episode of The Wire, “Bunny,” of Baltimore city police, says he doesn’t know what the answer is to getting kids off the corner and returning the streets to the citizens of Baltimore, only that it can’t be a lie. That’s correct, and it can’t be a lie in real life. Yet, empire is a lie. The wars to maintain it are a lie. The war on drugs is a lie. Saying we don’t have the resources nor the will to house the homeless, feed the hungry and care for the uninsured is a lie.
It’s easy to get fired up by The Wire, and that art’s role in society—to challenge us, to make us think, and help us to care. On these fronts, HBO’s gritty crime drama is a huge success.
I love to eat fish. Fresh fish, frozen fish, you name it. But the eco-conscious consumer in me wants to know which is better for me, and the environment.
According to Abby Haight of The Oregonian, frozen is better for the planet because it takes so much less energy to make it safely to your dinner plate.
“We said, ‘Eat wild salmon,'” said Astrid Scholz, vice president of knowledge systems at Ecotrust. “But it made me a little uneasy…. There’s something wrong about catching an Alaska salmon, putting it on a helicopter, and then putting it on a jet to Moscow and then to New York so someone can eat their $50 dinner of fresh Copper River salmon.”
Salmon that are flash-frozen at sea can be transported by freighter or train, which uses significantly less fossil fuel than jets. Troll-caught fish burn diesel fuel as ships chase fish across the seas. An Alaska salmon caught by a purse seiner, however, has a low carbon impact, Scholz said.
megnut and Ninecooks both have articles on cooking flash frozen fish.
Darby and I both had yesterday off, so we headed out to wine country to retrieve our two Collector’s Club magnums at Sokol Blosser. Given that Sokol Blosser is located deep in the heart of the Dundee Hills and surrounded by other excellent wineries, we decided to drop in on Tori Mor and Archery Summit, as well.
Tori Mor makes a respectable product, no doubt. But when the nectar served at Archery Summit hit our palates, we knew we’d left excellence at the gate for another realm where adjectives fear to dwell. Of course, that hasn’t stopped mortals from describing Archery Summit’s wines.
Wine Spectator says, “Archery Summit has established itself as the Rolls-Royce of Oregon Pinot Noir.”
Tamara Belgard of Sip With Me says, “I think they (Archery Summit) just might be the Princess Diana of Oregon Pinot Noir; elegant, graceful and classy yet still somehow strong, warm and approachable.”
Clearly, winemaker Anna Matzinger has two hands, her heart, mind and soul in this, along with the requisite volcanic soils and micro-climates where the grapes are grown.
Willamette Live says Matzinger is “unassuming for someone who just had her 2006 Red Hills Estate Pinot Noir named the best wine in Oregon by Portland Monthly Magazine.”
Here’s a passage from the Willamette Live piece:
Archery Summit uses the most sustainable and organic processes possible while producing their vintages.
Matzinger views pinot grapes as the ones best able to express the terrain on which they were grown. She prefers to get out of their way over fiddling with something that isn’t broken.
From the fermentation tanks, the wine flows down to settling tanks and then down again to one of the winery’s more than 600 barrels – all of which are stored in man-made tunnels excavated for the task of storing the wine at a constant temperature.
“We have a great facility, but its job is not messing up the fruit coming in from the field,” she said.
Sean in guest relations at the winery explained to us how Archery Summit prunes its vines by as much as one-half to maximize the flavor in the remaining fruit. This also helps explain the steep prices per bottle, as the winemaker is removing plenty of good fruit in order to pursue her annual masterpieces.
I’m fascinated by Jonathan Harris and his sketchbooks.
When we use manual instruments to write and draw, I think there’s more feeling in the work, similar to how there’s more sound in a vinyl record than there is in a compact disc.
Harris is obviously a master with pen and paper, but he’s also a technologist. As he considers next steps in the evolution of storytelling, he imagines that it will play out online (which is more than a little likely).
Here’s a passage from the video above that’s worth studying closely:
Anything can be the hub. Anything can be the center. I really believe that’s the future of information presentation. The metaphor of the page as an organizing principal is dead. It’s archaic. It doesn’t work anymore. A better approach is to portray a world of connectivity. A world of connections. A huge connected graph where any node in the graph can be the first order node and everything else is expressed in relation to that node.
For sure, the page has always been a lonely place. Maybe that’s why I find comfort in it. The reality is both modalities are in play today—the lonely page (physical or digital) and the rushing river of real time “conversation.” Both have immense value. But the roar of the river can be deafening, especially in the rainy season. A notebook is a quiet place to think, a refuge from modernity. I need to spend more time in mine.
PORTLAND—Last night, about 50 entrepreneurs, and those interested in that lonely path, gathered in Keen Footwear’s Great Room to hear from a panel of local business owners willing to share their hard-earned advise. The “Start Your Own Business” panel was organized by Zimmerman Community Center, whose mission is “to strengthen civic and spiritual life while developing the identity of The River District.”
The panel was moderated by Randy Miller, president of the Portland Ambassadors business advocacy group. Michelle Cairo of In the Black; Robin Jones of 88 Inc.; Otto Papasadero of NARDA (and a Zimmerman board member); and Sarah Shaoul of Black Wagon were on the panel.
The panel covered a lot of ground in a short span, but for me the key takeaway came from Papasadero. He said, “Your business has to be well documented to be successful. Documents detail how the business works.”
After the session, I asked Papasadero to clarify and name the actual documents he thinks are important. He said 1) your business plan and 2) your operations manual. Papasadero also told a story about how Warren Buffett was so impressed with the documentation from Dufresne Furniture in Winnipeg, that he offered to buy the company’s documents (not the actual company).
Papasadero’s point on documentation is ultimately partly about transfer of ownership. He said when one sells their company, even if it’s a sole-proprietorship, the buyer wants a turn-key experience and that’s found in the company’s documentation.
Another highlight of the evening came in Miller’s introductory remarks. He said “there’s a perception that this community is anti-business, which is dead wrong.” Miller said business formation in Portland has tripled this year. He also made a great point about the mutually beneficial relationship between one big business and many small business. For instance, Intel, the largest private employer in Oregon, has 8000 Oregon vendors, he said.
There was also talk from Miller and the panelists about the “defining moment” that drives one to launch (and stick with) a business. Papasadero said defining moments come along semi-regularly, “but we don’t always recognize them.”
I’m reflecting now on my own defining moments, and I have to say, being fired more than once from an ad agency job helped me see that there’s little security in placing one’s fate in another manager’s hands. Yet, I still go back and forth, thinking that “a job” might be the better path (I wish I didn’t). Another entrepreneur I know also struggles and wavers from time to time. But he reminded me earlier this week that when he did work for other people, he hated it. That’s a common theme among entrepreneurs and another important source of “defining moments.”
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
Law professor William J. Quirk, writing in The American Scholar, examined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tax returns from 1919–1940 and came away with a detailed portrait of a rich man–perhaps unexpectedly, for Fitzgerald portrayed the rich from close physical proximity, but with (mostly devastating) emotional distance.
Quirk’s direct examination of the writer’s records indicate:
Until 1937 he kept a ledger—as if he were a grocer—a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The 1929 ledger recorded items as small as royalties of $5.10 from the American edition of The Great Gatsby and $0.34 from the English edition.
The publication of This Side of Paradise when he was 23 immediately put Fitzgerald’s income in the top 2 percent of American taxpayers. Thereafter, for most of his working life, he earned about $24,000 a year, which put him in the top 1 percent of those filing returns. Today, a taxpayer would have to earn at least $500,000 to be in the top 1 percent.
His best novels, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), did not produce much income. Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald’s lifetime.
Fitzgerald wrote short stories for magazines to earn money which provided him the freedom to pursue less well paying but artistically significant works. He also moved to Los Angeles and wrote scripts for the studios. During his Hollywood years, he was never paid less than $1,000 a week. By contrast, Warner Bros., in the 1940s, paid William Faulkner $300 a week.
Also by comparison, I received a check in the mail from Google today for $100.73. According to Technorati, I’m among the 28% of bloggers, a.k.a. writers, who make some amount of cash from their efforts today. That’s a lot of people making a little bit of money, when the trick–one clearly mastered by Fitzgerald–is to be one of the few writers making lots of money.
Twenty five years ago, Dirty Dozen Brass Band released its first album, My Feet Can’t Fail Me Now and New Orleans became that much funkier.
With classic cuts such as “Lil Liza Jane” and the stirring version of “St. James Infirmary,” in addition to rousing originals such as “Blackbird Special” and the title track, this album set the standard for what was to become a reinvigorated brass band scene in the Crescent City.
To celebrate the anniversary, DDBB has made the title track of its debut album available for free on its website. In addition, the group will re-release a re-mastered version of the currently out of print album and play the disc in its entirety at several shows this fall, according to Jambands and Jambase.
Here’s the full track list:
1. Blackbird Special
2. Do It Fluid
3. I Ate Up the Apple Tree
4. Bongo Beep
5. Blue Monk
6. Caravan
7. St James Infirmary
8. L’il Liza Jame
9. Mary Mary
10. My Feet Can’t Fail Me Now
Disc opener and title track “New Country Blues” is another major highlight. Its assaultingly quick pace gets the music started on the right footing, establishing straight away the theme of the album—pulling away from the trappings of urban life in exchange for the simplicity of the country. Its refrain is sincere and catchy, “I ain’t going back to the city no more / I’m staying right here on the farm.”
I also like track three, “Surfing the Red Sea.” It’s sounds like a Garcia-Grisman number to me.
Emmitt-Nershi Band is playing in-store today at Twist & Shout Records in Denver, before embarking on a Rocky Mountain and West Coast swing. We plan to see them at Mississippi Studios later this month.
How Portland am I? I’m underemployed, a fixture at the dog park and I wear a hoody. Plus I love micros, local pinot noir and dining at the city’s premier food carts. It’s this last bit I’d like to tell you more about.
Gourmet Magazine recently profiled eight of Portland’s not-to-miss carts, and I’ve enjoyed two of them this week (and it’s only Wednesday).
To me, dining out is partly about the adventure. If the restaurant or food cart serves ethnic food, I want to travel to that far away land, edibly speaking. Cora y Huichol Taqueria on SE 82nd and Holgate really delivers in the transport department. It’s a short journey down SE 82nd, but when you arrive at this concrete corner and eat the dishes made by skilled and caring ladies, you’re no longer in Portland at all.
Marissa Robinson-Textor, writing for Gourmet, says:
the moment you taste the Nayarit and Jalisco specialties at this little white truck, you’ll be riding the waves with the best of them. In a city brimming with quality Mexican food, items like tacos al pastor certainly hold their own, but it’s the seafood dishes—a tangy, spicy “ceviche†and tostadas de camaron—that will hook, line, and sinker you.
I ordered two ceviche tostadas and lightly decorated them with salsa habanera. I’m always on the hunt for good ceviche and it is an elusive dish, indeed. But now I know who in Portland has their ceviche game together. The tostadas were filled to the brim with a shrimp and octopus (I think) mixture, drowning in lime juice. The shrimp was perfectly marinated, and the tostadas were thick enough to handle the generous toppings.
I can’t wait to return to try some other items from Cora y Huichol Taqueria. I’m thinking a torta might be my next call when I’m out that way again.
