Pedalpalooza is over. I did quite a bit this year by way of organizational participation. I produced the Pedalpalooza and Multnomah County Bike Fair t-shirts, thanks especially to Tripper Dungan, Carie Wiesenbach-Folz, Maggie Michaels, Sang Park, and the others who helped out. I also assisted Sang Park and Melissa Medeiros in doing the decorations for the fair. I put together a really cool archway made of bolted-together chainrings, and painted/lettered several signs. At the fair I acted for most of the afternoon as a judge of the "arena" competitions. I wore several ridiculous wigs.
My favorite ride of Pedalpalooza was Shawn Granton's Atomic War Preparedness Ride. I went in character as a member of the Citizens' Security Service of the Department of Homeland Security. Shawn did great research and planning for the ride. It ended up on Kelly Butte where the City of Portland built an emergency bunker to house the city Government in the event of Nuclear attack in the 1950's. The bunker is still there, all overgrown and grafitti ridden.
Afterwards we watched this amazing made-for-TV dramatization called "The Day Called X" about what would happen in the event of a possible Soviet bomber attack on Portland, starring the real people of the time.
Carye Bye's Eastside small-museum bike tour was also very fascinating and well-planned, unfortunately I had to leave early and miss the Toy Museum.
Do you know where you can go in Portland and see the actual ear that Kyle MacLachlan finds on the ground in Blue Velvet? Or the very large suit-jacket that Orson Welles wears throughout "Touch of Evil"?
On the Morning After the Morning After
the Truth was revealed at last:
soldiers dressed in satin gowns
taking orders from a child with a lash
And the houses lay in ruins
wasted by the holy flame
thank God the war was ended
by a hurricane
And the child stands there triumphant
with his lash
and the blessings of the priests
who told him all their secrets
at the final happy feast
And now the priests are beggars
and the beggars have the guns
and there's no more ammunition
and nowhere to run
So the soldiers wear the robes of the priesthood
and hope somehow its enough
to carry out the orders
written down in blood
And the rest of us just stand staring
at the glory that was our home,
the Iron Age has ended:
Long Live Rome
Seattle, 1995
standing in the sunshine, shrinking from the shadow of the stone.
And now they have a vision
exlpoding from the inside
from a god they wish would leave them all alone.
Or maybe its a demon, loose inside their dreaming
daring them to follow him, far away from home.
Down beneath the Cities, down below the fires
that keep the engines burning, that keep us all alive,
But the engines are exploding into monuments of flame
and everyone is waking to a dream where they proclaim
to see beyond the beauty of their stories and their lies
straight into the poetry of their bloodshot eyes.
And now they all come running through the curtain of the night,
if what they want is spectacle there's nothing left to hide.
Did they come for Armageddon, the Great and Final Show?
Or will they all be happy,
simply just to know that they are not alone.
The Columbia River as it goes past Portland looks as wide and calm as a lake, but you learn very quickly if you launch into it in a rubber dingy full of camping supplies and food that it has a strong and inexorable current, such that if you intend to get to a particular spot on the shore of (say) Government Island you'd better start several hundred yards upstream and aim counterintuitively hard to starboard. And it'll still take seemingly forever, but finally you'll get there, drawn by the campfire glow and the happy shouts of the friends who've already made it. Island Party! It was Ayleen Crotty's birthday Saturday, and she did it right. The 7 rubber and one aluminum boats were just enough for the band of hardy adventurers (including herculean ferrying back and forth by superhero Alex.)
It was an absolute hoot, the difficulty of the crossing notwithstanding. Just don't ever be fooled into thinking the Columbia acts like a lake just because it is as wide as one.
But it is shallow enough along the Government Island shore to jump in and splash around at 3:00 AM.
Government Island is an interesting place. Mostly a jungle of Cottonwood forest but a wide swath of grassy meadow along the edge. The heavy river traffic goes along the other (north) side, so paddlers only need to dodge drunken speedboaters on the 1/2 mile crossing from the Marine Drive bike path. That's 1/2 mile as the heron flies, not counting the endless battling of the current just to keep from ending up in Astoria.
But all in all, the funnest party I've been to in the last year.
Pedalpalooza going on again. So far I'm finding it hard to get into it as much as last year (even though I've taken on producing the Pedalpalooza and Multnomah County Bike Fair T-shirts,) not that it isn't great, and the Kickoff parade was smashing, and I will probably go on at least several more rides. But man, i need a change. I need a big long trip. I need something. I mean, when you're feeling ennui even in the midst of great wondrous things, its time for a jumpstart to the soul, or a line of coke, or something. But coke is a line I have no plans to ever cross, so perhaps I will wake up one morning and hitchike across the country. Oh right, I have a house and a mortgage. Hmmm... And in truth, I love this place and these people. But I need something.
For my job I am obliged to work 10 hour shifts before/during/post both the Starlight Parade (last Saturday night) and Grand Floral Parade (next Saturday morning.) I normally avoid these sort of giant civic-corporate parades, but what I discovered during the pre-Starlight Parade hours is that downtown becomes a totally humane zone of tens of thousands of people milling and playing in the closed-off parade route streets, kids making chalk drawings, families picnicing, people playing catch. It was actually really wonderful to behold. I wasn't able to see the parade itself, but I guess at least March Fourth marched in it, with the zoo-bombers sneaking in behind them.
Thursday is the Pedalpalooza Kickoff Parade/Ride. Bruce Orr and I will provide some "surprise" musical accompaniment on trumpet and clarinet. I'll have to miss the Noontime Musical Mystery Ride on Saturday because of my work schedule. My current job ends June 30. Anyone wanna hire me to do something after that?
Probably. I loved the original 2, then never saw Return of the Jedi until it was re-released in 2000 or whenever that was. I could just tell (way back when) from the trailer and hype that it would be a crapulous disappointment, and i was basically right.
When "Episode 1" came out I fell for the hype and saw it (how could I not have?) and it was shite. Betrayal upon betrayal, really, of something that was an important part of my pre-adolescent worldview. Not that, in hindsight, the originals were objectively great films, but you know what I'm talking about. They had something.
So it was easy to avoid "Episode 2" when it came out. Today I finally caught it (most of it anyway) on DVD. And I can safely say it is the biggest piece of time-wasting crap I've seen in, well, ever really. It is bad on so many levels, in so many ways. Is it just expected that Star Wars dialogue will be some of the worst ever written for the screen? Look, here's my capsule review: Episode 2 is worse than any Star Trek episode or film ever created.
So I don't care how "good" and "dark" Episode 3 supposedly is. Unless I intuit that it is somehow a stand-alone film of actual greatness, I'm not going to see it (unless incidentally at some future moment when a friend is playing it on DVD.) Nothing as far as I'm concerned could redeem the mess that became of the whole enterprise with episodes 6, 1, and 2. The emperor has no damn clothes. Star Wars in its completion is the worst multi-part enterprise in the history of film.
You want an effective mythology, intelligent storytelling, great action, (mostly) enjoyable characters, good acting, the whole shebang? The Lord of the Rings fulfilled all that. Fundamentally it fulfills because it is based on one of the greatest literary creations of modern times, an invented cosmology which summarizes and includes the deepest and most profound wisdom of the Western mythic tradition. Tolkien's universe is complete unto itself but is also basically our world and our perrenial mythology translated into a broadly European folkloric framework. Plus the man was just a plain good storyteller. The films, thank heavens, were created by an enormously talented person who knew what to include and how to let the story unfold cinematically. I wish they'd included (at least on DVD) Tom Bombadil, since he is one of the most fascinating characters Tolkien created, at once whimsical, mysterious, and enormously powerful (he is the only person completely unaffected by the power of the Ring.) But whatever. All I'm saying is, Lucas is a hack who strung us out for 28 years on the dubious strength of a 101-level hackneyed adaptation of the Hero theme, whereas Tolkien and Jackson made something that is simply orders of magnitude better.