The film, four years in the making, is the story of one of America’s truest folk art forms, the rock poster.
Beginning in the 1960s in San Francisco with the birth of the dance concert, a rock poster accompanied almost every show that was put on during that era.
“At the time, Janis Joplin and The Grateful Dead were not played on the radio, and the only way you could advertise their shows, was by hanging posters in the streets”, explains author Robert Greenfield.
Today, America is seeing a resurgence in this art form, brought upon by the popularity of websites like Gigposters.com, and the ease of silk screening. Artists like EMEK, Tara McPherson, and Jay Ryan are creating beautiful works of art for contemporary groups like The Decemberists and Death Cab For Cutie.
The film includes interviews with over 30 artists and takes the viewer on a journey through the different decades and incarnations of this rebellious art form.
Ryan Frank, The Oregonian’s real estate writer, looks at the commercial real estate situation on Portland’s NW 23rd Avenue and paints a not pretty picture.
The 23rd Avenue shopping strip, Portland’s palace of posh, is fraying under the weight of the recession. Empty storefronts are now as visible as double lattes.
From every street corner between Everett and Raleigh streets — 13 blocks — shoppers can spot a “For Lease” sign or plywood-covered window. Demand has fallen far enough that a head shop called Mary Jane’s House of Glass can now afford a 23rd Avenue storefront.
Let’s look on the bright side. Frank points out that things were worse during the Dot Bust of ’01; easy access to a head shop isn’t necessarily a bad thing; and enterprising businesses in need of space can find good deals on rent right now.
Trendythird wasn’t always an expensive shopping district. In fact, not long ago at all, it was a forest. Tomorrow, it’ll take on another hue.
The band known as “The Dead” embark on spring tour 2009 today in Greensboro, NC. It’s not news that this band has friends in high places (and high friends in places), but today it’s imminently clear that some of those friends work for The New York Times.
There’s a massive print and multimedia feature written by Ben Ratliffe in today’s paper, clearly timed in concert with the start of this tour. The feature examines Deadheads’ eternal need to define, categorize and remember. For instance, many heads believe 5/8/77 was the best performance ever delivered by Grateful Dead.
Ratliffe’s central argument is that one needs ALL the information in order to confidently make such declarations, and that advances in technology are making analysis of the band a more exact science.
In the late ’80s information access was limited. You had to work for your collection. It wasn’t all online. In 1987 the ability to point to a certain show — a Cornell ’77 or a Fillmore East 1970 — indicated great knowledge. But we can also now say that it indicated a kind of lack of knowledge. Because more and more of us now know, from better and better audio evidence, how the band sounded in the weeks and months around those famous nights.
Playing right into this need for further inquiry, the band recently released To Terrapin: Hartford from that same tour and Gary Lambert, a host of the Grateful Dead Radio show “Tales From the Golden Road” on Sirius XM, considers it just as good as 5/8/77.
The reality is people like what they like. I like shows from 1980-85. Like this one from West High in Anchorage, AK on Summer solstice, 6/21/80:
…and this one from Merriweather Post Pavillion on 6/27/84:
Our friend Colleen treated us to a private tour and tasting at Lemelson Vineyards on Saturday. It was a special treat for my 44th birthday and it was an honor to be welcomed as VIP guests from the minute our party arrived.
Colleen is Lemelson’s National Sales Manager, which means she travels to accounts non-stop to act as the winery’s ambassador. And from what we saw on Saturday, she’s quite the ambassador. In fact, it’s clearly time to start calling her Madame Ambassador.
First, Colleen showed us the facility’s vaulted high tech room where the grapes are destemmed and put into large stainless fermentation tanks. Then we descended like gravity to lower rooms with more tanks before reaching various cellar rooms where Colleen explained in great detail what was inside all the expensive French Oak barrels. Lucky for us, we tasted straight from the barrels so our education would be complete. After the tour we soaked up the day’s warm sun on the deck and let some of Oregon’s finest wine flow down our gullets.
It was a great time to put it mildly. If you have yet to experience a glass of pinot noir from Lemelson, do yourself and your loved ones a favor and let the good times roll…
Buddy and Julie Miller are out with a new album, Written in Chalk that’s tearing up the Americana charts and hitting people where it counts — in the heart, gut and head.
The album’s lead song, “Ellis County” presents a picture of The Great Depression that is distinctly human. “Times were hard, but we didn’t know it. If we ate, we had to grow it,” sings the couple to a contemporary audience that’s clearly in tune with (and in need of) these kind of not so scary stories from the last severe hardship our nation endured.
With music that is always deeply personal, naturally eccentric and spiritually weighted, not to mention expertly performed, Buddy Miller is considered an auteur and a virtuoso. A skilled producer and emotive songwriter, Buddy is also widely recognized as one of the best guitar players in Nashville.
“Both Buddy and Julie Miller have famously good taste, and Written in Chalk, with its wide range of voices and styles, nicely displays the different modes in which they can work,” says Pop Matters.
While our focus here is clearly on Oregon wine, beer and coffee, the great state of Washington is right across the river, just a few miles from Portland. Therefore, it can’t hurt to become knowledgeable about the liquid goings on there.
According to Ruth Zschomler of The Oregonian, Washington ranks second in the U.S. after California in wine production. The wine industry contributes more than $3 billion to the state’s economy and provides 14,000 jobs.
The state recently licensed its 600th winery. By comparison, Oregon has nearly 400 wineries.
Clark County, near Portland, has six commercial vineyards with three more underway and an eye toward earning a designation as an American Viticultural Area. The local growers in Clark County have formed the Southwest Washington Winery Association, a nonprofit, to help attain AVA status.
The winery association is working on viticulture education in Clark College in Vancouver. The college’s corporate and continuing education program offers 13 classes in wine education.
Bob Dylan has a new album coming out on April 28th called Together Through Life. “Beyond Here Lies Nothin'” is one of the featured tracks on the blues heavy record.
The Los Angeles Times says of the song, “There’s something Leonard Cohen-esque about Dylan’s lyric, which is deeply existential and exceedingly debonair.” The Times also mentions that David Hildago’s accordion is “Dylan’s muse” on this song and throughout the album.
As part of the publicity for Together Through Life, Dylan engaged in a Q+A with Bill Flanagan. Here’s an excerpt:
BF: The new record’s very different from Modern Times which was a number one hit. It seems like every time you have a big hit, the next time out you change things around. Why don’t you try to milk it a little bit?
Dylan: I think we milked it all we could on that last record and then some. We squeezed the cow dry. All the Modern Times songs were written and performed in the widest range possible so they had a little bit of everything. These new songs have more of a romantic edge.
BF: How so?
These songs don’t need to cover the same ground. The songs on Modern Times songs brought my repertoire up to date, and the light was directed in a certain way. You have to have somebody in mind as an audience otherwise there’s no point.
BF: What do you mean by that?
There didn’t seem to be any general consensus among my listeners. Some people preferred my first period songs. Some, the second. Some, the Christian period. Some, the post Colombian. Some, the Pre-Raphaelite. Some people prefer my songs from the nineties. I see that my audience now doesn’t particular care what period the songs are from. They feel style and substance in a more visceral way and let it go at that. Images don’t hang anybody up. Like if there’s an astrologer with a criminal record in one of my songs it’s not going to make anybody wonder if the human race is doomed. Images are taken at face value and it kind of freed me up.
How odd it must be to have poetic visions as insanely beautiful as Dylan’s and be asked to explain them to people, as if explaining them is entirely possible and even the courteous thing to do.
The Wall Street Journal is offering a little lifestyle essay from novelist and short story writer, Thomas McGuane.
McGuane in many ways is a close literary relative of Jim Harrison. Interestingly, both hail from Michigan, where hunting and fishing are practically a religion. Maybe the fact that I hail from Nebraska–where hunting and fishing is absolutely a religion, along with football–makes me a prime candidate to be a big fan of these unabashedly western writers.
In the Journal piece, McGuane speaks eloquently about his two dogs, Abby and Daisy, the Pointer Sisters.
Bird dogs plead with you to imagine the great things you could be doing together. Their delight is a lesson in the bliss of living. As Bob Dylan says, “You’ve got to serve somebody.” I serve my dogs and in return, they glom the sofa. Too many hunting dogs live depressing lives in kennels with automatic feeders and waterers, exercised only enough to keep them ready for work.
This last bit makes me happy, as Darby and I have a new bird crazy dog and she’s logging some pretty solid “on the bed” time, something my two grandfathers would never have allowed. Their dogs were “strictly for hunting” although they were fed manually, run daily and well cared for.
[BONUS LINK FRIM THE GOOGLE] Here’s a 1984 interview with McGuane in Key West.
Powell’s Books recently dropped plans for a $5 million expansion
The New York Times decided that Portland would make a good case study for cities feeling the pain of recession.
Portland, a metropolitan area of 2.2 million people, affords an ideal window onto the spiral of fear and diminished expectations assailing the economy. The area has long attracted investment and talented minds with its curbs on urban sprawl, thriving culinary scene and life in proximity to the Pacific Coast and the snow-capped peaks of the Cascades. In good times, Portland tends to grow vigorously, elevated by companies like the computer chip maker Intel — which employs 15,000 people in the area — and the athletic clothing giant Nike.
But in recent months, Portland has devolved into a symbol of much that is wrong. Housing prices have fallen more than 14 percent since May 2007. Foreclosures more than tripled last year, according to RealtyTrac. The unemployment rate for the metro area surged from 4.8 percent at the end of 2007 to 9.8 percent in January 2009, according to the Labor Department.
With a major deepwater port on the Columbia River, Portland has benefited from the growth of global trade, gaining jobs for stevedores, truckers and warehouse workers. But as the global recession tightens, Portland’s docks are a snapshot of diminishing fortunes.
On a recent day, parking lots at the port were full of 30,000 automobiles that had been shipped in from Japan and South Korea, yet sat unclaimed by dealerships as sales plummeted.
I’m not sure what to make of this story. Facts are facts and the fact is times are tough. Yet, something resembling normal life is clearly going on at the same time. New restaurants are opening in revitalized Old Town. Bands are playing. Coffee shops are full. Conferences are going off as planned.
As someone who writes stories, I know first hand how you shape a story by leaving things out. The story above and most stories on the economy today leave the good news out (on purpose) because it doesn’t fit with the story their editors are asking for. Why editors need to ask for that same negative reinforcement story over and over is beyond me, but since the habit is well established it pays to look past the paper directly to people in the community for news.
