Portland is Burning!

 Wait! No! I mean...Portland is on fire! 

We're LIT! Not actually burning! No smoke, no flames!

No. Just no. Outside of the usual assload of scruffy street people, Portland is fine.

So we braved the Antifa arson mobs the other day to poke around downtown, and ran into two of our favorite places here in the Beehive of Terrorism.

The first was Scrap.

Scrap is...well, pretty much everything. You want old stickers? Weird metal bits? X-ray prints? Patterns from the 1970s? Glitter, ribbon, postcards from 1908, decoupage (who knew that decoupage was even still a thing?), back issues of National Geographic?

Scrap's got 'em.

The Bride goes to paw through the fabric and other sewing treasures. 

I just like the congeries of weird and bizarre old vinyl, hubcaps, and random shit that the place has scrounged up. 

Sewing Susan? Ohhellyes!

There's even some stuff that is not entirely appropriate for the kiddies!

 

This is a postcard, BTW. I'd pay good money to see the look on the other folks at the post office when you take that out of the post box.

Even the street randos like them some Scrap!

Then down to near Pioneer Square to the downtown Kinokuniya.

Our local outlet of this Japanese bookstore has every manga and most anime every released (of course), and it is pretty critical for keeping up with Spy x Family and The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen and all my other manga favorites.

But it also has every cute, silly, whack, funny, goofy, and just Japanese thing that a would-be otaku could ever crave.

 

All topped off with a stop at St. Honore boulangerie for coffee and a croissant?

Because that's how we roll here in Little Beirut.  

Burn, baby, burn!

Make Idaho Great Again

 The rump polity that is Oregon's GQP has a brilliant new idea: secede from lib'rul commie hippie dope-smoking latte-sippin' Oregon and join the Real America of Idaho.

The plan, if you want to call "something that appeared to me in a vision after a long afternoon stting in the garage and huffing several spray-cans of Rust-Oleum" a "plan", is to take the unpaved portions of Oregon - effectively everything east of the Cascades and south of Eugene and spot-weld it onto Idaho. Oh, a couple of the more deserty bits of northern California are included, too.

Having lived with these people for thirty years now, I won't even try and argue about this. It would be like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat. Let me just point out a couple of teensy little issues with this cunning plan.

The parts of Oregon involved are the least populated and poorest parts of the state. At least one of them - I want to say Gilliam County, but it could be any one of the damn dryland parts - tried to dissolve itself some time back because it was so fucking poor it couldn't pay for stuff like courts and roads and tax assessors.

These places can't survive economically without the engine that is Portland and the Willamette Valley. Oh, and you'll notice that these teatards cut out Bend, too, that immigrant-infested Sanctuary City, so as to prevent even the tiniest hint of solvency from intruding on their White American Dream.

I don't know how Boise feels about this, but if I was an Idaho legislator, wingnut or not, I'd be terrified to see these gomers shambling up to my statehouse doors like so many walking brain-dead under a red MAGA ballcap. If they get their wish the whole fucking place would look Kyrgystan in a week or two.

The complaint that these rural chucklefucks have is that they have no voice now in Oregon. And they're right; the Oregon GOP has become so utterly toxic that it retains only a handful of seats in the lower house. The upper house Republicans have enough warm bodies to deny a quorum, which is their only hope of...well, not really "doing anything" but preventing the rest of the Oregon lege from doing anything, which is why every session now they run and hide. They have no "agenda". All they can do is try and fuck up the rest of the system.

And why is that?

Because back in the 90s - I've told you this before - a couple of fucksticks called Don McIntyre and Bill Sizemore formed something called "Oregon Taxpayers United".

Yep. They were the Original Oregon Tax-Revolters.

The managed to con Oregonians to passing something called Ballot Measure 5 in November 1990. It gutted the property tax system, saving Nonna and Poppy a couple of hundred bucks a year and Intel and Flav-R-Pac untold billions.

But they went beyond that.

The Oregon Republicans became teabaggers before there were teabaggers, and Trumpkins before there were Trumpkins. They went all-in on queer-bashing, immigrant-hate, plutocrat-fluffing, open-carry, sovereign-citizen nonsense before going utterly batshit for Trump. They made the Republican brand so utterly toxic that they managed to lose the fat suburban enclaves of Washington County.

When you're too insane to pander to a Beaverton car dealership owner? You're waaaayyyyy too insane.

Yet somehow, they managed it.

Now this is their desperation play; they hope to leave the fleshpots of Sodom and join the arid manly men of rural Idaho in a MAGAt paradise where men really ARE men (and not he-shes in logging drag), God is in His Heaven, and women are barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.

You can see how that would appeal to a 21st Century Oregonian!

Anyway, this nonsense isn't going anywhere just for purely procedural reasons. But the mere fact that these nitwits actually want it tells you something about how utterly desperately looney these people are.

And, as I keep saying; a republic cannot function with this level of insanity. At about 30% of the population the pure noise generated by these crazies will drown out everything else.

We can be a republic.

Or we can be Republicans.

But given their current level of insanity we cannot be both.

Even in our own private Greater Idaho.

Twenty years ago yesterday...

...was the "Whack Heard 'Round the World."

I had moved to Oregon barely three years earlier, at a time when Tonyamania was nearly at its height.

The muscular little woman from southeast Portland was Oregon's best known resident at that time, I recall, so as it unfolded the whole appalling saga of Tonya, her porn-star-wannabe husband, the security guard with the bizarre fantasites, the strange little man with the club who did the actual whacking, and the toothy ice princess who was suddenly the Maiden in Distress for the popular press made for fascinating viewing.

It was like a bloody freeway collision; horrible but almost impossible to look away from.

Twenty years on Tonya is still an odd sort of demi-celebrity out here in her home state; many Oregonians feel a sort of schadenfreude about her.

Yes, she's awful, but awful in the same way as the uncle who turned out to be a flashy, high-rolling embezzler, or the aunt who turned out to be a shameless and brazen grand horizontal; awful, yes, but sort of...our awful, an awful so close that it becomes almost loveable in its awfulness.

She and her little gang of fellow idiots turned out to be the spokesmodels for "Keep Oregon Weird".

What I recall thinking then, and still think now when I bother to think about her, was how completely and utterly she reminded me of all the other people I knew who came from the same parts of Clackamas County she came from.

These were people who were just brutally...marginal; sad, hardscrabble fuckups who were often just one mishap away from being human trainwrecks, deadly combinations of barely-bright, poorly-educated, undisciplined-to-the-point-of-undisciplinable.

In the Army we called these sorts of people "shit magnets". “Bad stuff” just “happened” to them; car wrecks, arrests...lost time, lost jobs, lost husbands and wives, lost lives.

Tonya was a kind of patron saint for those people, and I think that's where a lot of the love came from.

She WAS them, just a little bigger, a little sparklier, a little more famous. Lots of people really wanted to love her because she seemed to be the little comet-that-could-escape the merciless gravitational pull of the trailer-park-stop-n-rob-highschool-doper-and-hootchie-mama Death Star. By her existence, by her celebrity, she gave those poor fuckers hope that they, too, could escape the nightmare that was their Fate.

Of course, she didn't.

The odd thing is that Nancy Kerrigan, the elegant and slender antithesis of the muscular little backstreet tough girl, got dragged into TonyaWorld and it had the nasty effect of showing her worst qualities, as well.

The little hints of self-pity we saw as she held her leg and moaned "Why me?" became a full-blown hissyfit after the gold medal loss to Baiul, herself something of a gawdawful wreck and I agree with Nancy Nall; you've gotta watch all the way through the banner at her site; it's perfect in the unspeakably perfect way it fits into this whole fucking perfect-head-on-collision of egomaniacs.

I think the final nail in Nancy's PR coffin was when she was caught pissing and moaning about the indignity of having to appear at some event at Disneyland. I have to agree I would have loathed having to caper around with a costumed mouse, but, hey, that's the price of fame.

The revelation some time later that she had been screwing around with her then-married-then-manager wasn't exactly a deal-breaker; she had been pretty well exposed as someone whose sense of entitlement was larger than her overbite.

The anniversary of this sordid little business yesterday was very strange. No one seemed to want to revisit the events of 1994 with any real zest, or re-examine the robust awfulness of the whole tacky little conspiracy and the unpleasant revelations it brought about a whole bunch of different people we had hoped to celebrate.

There was a certain amount of domestic pleasantry surrounding Kerrigan, who does seem to have matured into a nice woman with a nice family.

Poor Tonya, still the fallen star, was barely visible; she appears to be back down where she started, married to an itinerant carpenter and living with her husband and son somewhere in the hinterlands of the eastern part of the state. The World's Worst Newspaper quotes her third husband's description of her: "She's kind, she's loving, she's a little rough around the edges. She's a redneck, but she's my redneck."

The bulk of the local stories made no mention of Tonya's other classic Clackamas County shit magnet escapades: the arrests, or the bizarre shenanigans like the putative kidnappings and hubcap (or was is an ashtray) assaults, no mention of the sad little wedding-night-porn-video, of the freakish foxy boxing "career". I got the sense that the public, and the public press, was trying to quietly apologize for making this poor sad little woman into a public freak show for a decade or more.

So. Myself? I kind of hope that Tonya finds something like happiness. Wherever and however she can.

We all deserve a little mercy before the end, don't we?

Down in southeast Portland her old skating rink in the Clackamas Town Center mall has gone, like Tonya, victim of hard times, bad choices, and bad luck.

So in their perfect, blandly awful mundaneity, perhaps the best last words on The Tonya and Nancy Story could be those of a nameless "Yahoo Contributor", who advised:

"So, don't come to skate but, the new 2 story Barnes & Noble and Macaroni Grill are worth the visit."

Yes, indeedy.

Henk Pander

A Facebook friend of mine recently ran up a sort of challenge where she assigned her commentors each a particular living artist to research. I got this guy; Henk Pander.

His stuff is a strange and arresting mashup of organic and mechanical imagery with an emphasis on wreckage. His human and demihuman figures seem to float - or struggle - through a landscape of broken machinery and shattered buildings.

What intrigues me, other than the purely visual enjoyment, is that Pander's bio puts him in Holland during WW2; he was between 7 and 8 when the German army was chased out of the Netherlands. Clearly some of his work is directly influenced by his childhood, but I wonder; how much of the rest, those visions of life amid the ruins, can also be traced back to his young life under Nazi occupation?

Pander is an Oregonian today, and I like to think that he was also influenced by one of our most delightful public memories: the exploding whale.

Boom, baby!

Regina Quondam et Futuram

My son ran headlong into an odd bit of Portland history last week; Queen Thelma.A group sponsored, I believe, by an outfit known as the Royal Rosarians turned up at his class to tell the kids about the history of the Rose Festival.

Now - as I've mentioned before - Rose Festival is a very odd sort of Portland thing in a place that treasures its oddity.

First of all, it's not really a "thing" at all; there's no real theme or purpose behind it, and it's span is so vague as to be almost meaningless. No one knows exactly when it begins, or ends, or what is or isn't part of it.

We know that it's not a purely musical event like, say, SXSW or Sasquatch, but there is music in it. It doesn't celebrate a historical or national event, like Cinco de Mayo or Fourth of July, or an event of significance to any particular group of people, like Kwanzaa or Christmas or Ramadan, but it has a sort of a history.

It does have parades, of several different types, and times, and themes. It has races, human and vehicular. It has an airshow, and dragon boat races, and a nasty carny (which is always held along the downtown stretch of the Willamette River and for years was known as the "Pepsi Fun Center" until one of our local weeklies published a story titled Face-down in the Fun Center, pointing out that the goddam centerpiece of the Rose Fest was a nasty carny filled with drunk frat boys and girls from fucking Beaverton and Gladstone gatoring in a vile mix of mud and used lager. I don't know what they called it after that, but it sure as hell wasn't the "Pepsi Fun Center") and several god knows what.

There's also a weekend when a small group of military and coastguard vessels turns up and ties up along the waterfront, adjacent to the whatever-they-call-what-used-to-be-the-"fun-center". This used to be entertaining for the locals, who got to visit the ships, and for the crews, who got to visit a liberty port not expressly designed around separating a sailor from his or her cash in the most nastily expeditious way possible.

That was pre-2001. Now security is so damn tight that nobody but invited guests get to tour the damn ships, which in return for very little entertainment value tie up traffic for several hours during Monday rush hour causing the bridges to raise when they head downriver. So sorry, sailor, you can stuff your "Fleet Week", in my opinion.

In fact, most Portlanders I know fall into two categories; those who sorta-kinda know that there's this "Rose Festival" thing that happens every spring but don't really care or take part in any of the events, and those who have some deep and passionate connection with one specific event that is part of the whole magilla but don't really care or take part in any of the other events.

For example, I have two friends who race in the dragon boat competition every year.

But that's all. They don't go to the parades, or down to the carny-formerly-known-as-the-"fun-center", or the air show, or the concerts. They don't know who the Queen of Rosaria is, or what the theme of the Starlight Parade is.

They do the dragon boat races, and nothing else.

And that's the way a LOT of Portlanders take this rascal.

Some get excited about one of the parades. Or the airshow. Some love the ships. Some - mostly young men from Gresham - come to get shitfaced at the carny and fall face-down in the mud and spew of Waterfront Park. But I honestly cannot think of anyone I know who gets all jiggly looking forward to "Portland's Official Festival".

So I got a kick out of my son - who has never given a rip about the thing other than the time that we got caught downtown in the middle of the Grand Floral Parade and the float caught fire, which he considered genuine quality entertainment - coming home stuffed full of information about Queen Thelma and W.J Hofmeister, her "Prime Minister", and Silas Christofferson, the ragtime aviation freak who rocked the RoseFest 100 years ago by flying off the roof of the old Multnomah Hotelin his Curtiss biplane and then, pioneering the tradition of Oregon residents fleeing to Clark County to avoid our income tax, landed fifteen minutes or so later at the Army airfield in Vancouver.

I find it mildly amusing that nowhere in the Rose Fest publicity for the centenary of this stunt is there a mention of hos insane it was and that this poor mook had only about four more year to live because of his enthusiams; like a lot of early aviators, he augered in - in his case on Hallowe'en Day, 1916;

"Silas was flying several hundred feet over the aviation field on Halloween 1916 in Redwood City, California when his engine went dead. He ‘volplaned’ but could not regain control of the aeroplane and was hurled to the ground. His plane overturned in a 100 feet fall during a trial of a new military biplane with a new innovative control system. His wife and two brothers watching the flight with a pupil of the Silas Christofferson Aviation School rushed to his aid; he was taken to a hospital were he died from his injuries."

Sucked to be him, but those guys had the life expectancy of caddis-fly larvae. It's pretty amazing when you think of how blase' we are about flying. A century ago it was like combat diving or panther wrestling, a sport only for the truly mad...

Imagine; 50,000 people stopping to watch an airplane fly overhead; it makes sense when you think that it had a damn good chance of falling ON their heads. It was a very different time

And that was not the only difference in the times. I get the sense that back in the teens the Rose Festival really WAS something. Certainly it seems to have been everything to young Thelma Hollingsworth; she spent the rest of her life connected to the thing, and appears to have had a splendid time living in the corona of the year she reigned as Queen of all Rosaria. What I find intriguing about her is how difficult it is to find her; do an Internet search for her picture; all I could find was the Oregonian shot of her "court" I have at top, this one, from about the Fifties or late Forties;

which seems to have been taken at some sort of Rose function; you'll note the skimmer-sporting Rosarian squiring Her Majesty.

The strange part about this is that all the articles about her talk about how the Queen and her court of pretty young ladies toured all over the Portland area and much of the Northwest that year, drumming up interest in the Festival. Photography was quite the rage in the Teens, and I cannot imagine that any young Portland, Seattle, or San Francisco camera-nut passing up the opportunity to get some snapshots of a pretty girl in fancy clothes amid a bevy of other cuties; men may have changed since 1914 but not in that respect...

My personal favorite, though, is this enlargement of the Oregonian photo;

It is the only one that I could find that gives you an actual sense of the young Miss Hollingsworth as a person. It's worth looking closely at her; go ahead. I'll wait.

So physically she seems to be a conventionally "pretty girl"; oval face, straight nose, dark eyes. She has a bit of a full chin, suggesting that she was pleasantly rounded in the fashion of the times, before the brutal modernity of the Twenties demanded a woman's figure lose all its womanly curvature.

It's hard to tell, since the background around her head appears to have been retouched, but she seems to have had a cloud of dark hair in the Edwardian style. The rest of her is buried under the pile of clothing she's been dressed in as her robes of "state".

But the worthwhile part is in her expression. Look at her again.

She's looking at something or someone down to her left; she's cocked her head a bit, and her glance is slightly hooded, as if she's trying not to be too obvious about not staring. But what- or who-ever it is seems to be providing her with a certain amount of amusement, given the traces of her smile.

And the smile is the good part; Queen Thelma seems to have a lovely, subtle smile, the corner of her lips tucked neatly away in a wry little curve that floats up from the old silver and black salts like a fragrant curl of smoke from snuffed candle.

It seems to contain a good deal of sense, and a good humor that bolts across the divide of nearly a century, jolting me into thinking that I would have enjoyed a lazy afternoon's company with this woman, hearing her talk of her work, and her excitement at her celebrity, and thinking up ways to provoke that fleetingly adorable smile.

I am not one of those who long for the past. For a person of my class and age 1912 would most likely have been an generally drudging and occasionally (e.g. typhus epidemic, financial panic, labor-management war in which I was beaten by strikebreakers or shot by the National Guard...) fearfully frightening time. I am very glad I live in 2012 and not 1912.

But looking at Thelma's smile I cannot but stop and think that there must have been something worthwhile about the then that made this young woman and her beloved Festival; for all that we cannot and I would not if we could, return, I wonder; what was it that has changed so that we are ourselves so much alike in so many ways, and yet in so many others so strange?

Late Night Thoughts

The rains are returning slowly; a little gusty spit this afternoon, with a drizzly day set for tomorrow. The shortening daylight seems determined to make the point nastily, slapping us on the back of the head to remind us that "standard time" will be here soon, as well, and the dreary part of the year wherein we wake and return home in darkness.

Poor little Peep; he was so angry tonight. Pestered his sister until reprimanded, then burst into tears and stomped away to his room. I tried to cuddle him in but he was full of spiky, angular resistance. Returning to the kitchen I heard a gust of new sobs; Mojo went in and emerged to inform me that he had, for some reason, yanked back on his foreskin so hard that he had really hurt himself. He spent the rest of the night with an icepack on his junk slowly regaining his sosiego. The new "Clone Wars" TV special coming this Friday helped with that.

It's hard being six-and-a-half, y'know?

We did have a wonderful time a couple of weeks back at the Timbers Kids Club game;playing soccer and the Peeper got to drill with the players and play munchkin soccer...when he forgets to be serious and spoiled he can really be a terrific kid.

Here's a couple more of the pics:Little girl was her usual happy, chatty, engaging self until bedtime. Informed that it was time to shut down the "Go Diego" computer game she ignored me, confident in her ability to charm the Daddy into abrogating his warning that continued gaming risked losing story time. So she played on, and erupted in the predictable tantrum when informed that she had lost her story time and would, instead, go right to bed.

"I WANT A STORY!!!" shrieked through the little house. From our bedroom where she was jammied, from the living room, where it substituted for the traditional "Nighty-night" with her mother and brother, from her bedroom, where I tried to cuddle her - looking back, gee, it seems like I spent a lot of time trying to clutch recalcitrant children to my breast, doesn't it? - and sing a lullaby...

Finally I laid her down on her Big Girl Bed, still rigid and shrilling.

"It's time for night-night, lovie." I said gently. "I WANT A STORY!!!" came the only reply from the teary little face.

"No, sweetie," I said, brushing her hair off her face, "It's too late for that. And it's time to stop screaming about it or you may lose your story tomorrow night, too."

Huge eyes. The shrieking stopped. In a little voice, Missy restated her demand: "I want a story..." but the hesitance was audible.

"Tomorrow night, dear, and that discussion is over, unless you want to lose even more story times."

Silence.

We kissed goodnight.

That girl is scary smart, and a great tactician. Knows the use of all her weapons, and when to hide the armory and sue for peace.

What the hell am I going to do when she's 17 and I'm 66?


Interesting discussion over at the Milpub about this:Now let me say a couple of things:

1. 2,000 wild monkeys would raise the moral and intellectual tone of several of the infantry battalions I knew at Ft. Bragg, and, yes, I'm looking at you, 2/325 Infantry. Fucking White Falcons; like the Special Olympics except with more brain damage and fewer medals...

2. It says something about my opinion of the Bush Presidency that I actually didn't see this as a mockery of the man; I laughed because of the ridiculous monkey scheme (when he gets to the part where he dubs it "Operation Primate Speargun" I fell over laughing and still do - it's a perfect summary of the serious silliness of military "code names") and the naive idiocy of the guy who often seemed like a poster child for naive idiocy - "Heckuva job, Brownie", "Is our children learning?", that sort of thing. But the man seems like such an insignificant figure now, that the idea of mocking him as a political statement? Never really "got" that. Weird, neh?

3. But my old comrade Publius DID, and it pissed him off. He had some acid remarks about laughing at the criminal bastard, and he posted a link to Andrew Sullivan's piece over at the Atlantic. So I went and read the thing.

4. And so now I'm thinking, yeah, I knew that ol' Andy was a pretty sad little wad of fuck, a homosexual Republican in an era where homo-hating is as Republican as apple pie, still trying to pretend that his cheerleading for the Mess-o-potamia was anything but the pathetic excitement of a leather queen drooling over a Tom of Finland piece of war porn, but this..? This...I can't really describe the mess that is Sullivan's moral and intellectual train wreck. Somehow Dubya, the smirking chimp of a frat boy who spent eight years lying, posing and evading his way around the Oval Office with Dick Cheney's hand up his ass to make his mouth move...somehow this niddering of a nothing of a shell of a "man" is supposed to come clean, supposed to fall on his sword for the torture, supposed to take one for the team?

What fucking world does Sullivan live in?

And I realized that this, this pathetic tottering gelding of an idea, staggering along with its organs of generation ripped away, leaking blood from the orchidectomy and the lobotomy that had caused it to elide the eight years of war loving, crony capitalist pandering stupidity that the Fool on the Hill had presided over, this was the current state of the "moderate Republicans".

Christ. No wonder their Party is such a mess. It's Limbaugh or THIS..?


Thinking of options for the coming weekend; birthday Sunday, anniversary (seventh - copper and wool for you traditionalists, brass for the chic modern types) Tuesday. The "weekend spa/resort getaway is covered...but what about something personal..?

Hard to shop for the woman who is - and has - everything.

Here's an odd little item from the Daily Mirror by way of Alterdestiny:

Seems that in 1909, the African-American residents of what is today Coos Bay decided that they would rather their children be uneducated than sit beside a dirty little Chinky Chinaman. China boy. Little Chinese boy.

Whatever.

Mind you, the condition of a black Oregonian in 1909 must have been pretty wretched. What earthly loathing could have made the presence of poor little Gao Wai so unacceptable? This was a segregated school, mind you - the white people figured that the darkies and the yellas and the other gomers would be just fine as long as the nice white people didn't have to see them.

The human condition - never truly free of horrors like pestilence, war, famine, sickness and death - never seems to be awful enough to make people forget that there's someone that should hate more than other people hate them.

Sometimes I despair for my species.

Anyway, I think I still have a post in me somewhere in Praise of Women. But it's late, and I have an early morning. So; goodnight.

Keeping Oregon Wierd

I had to take this picture on the way home from work yesterday just because I really liked all the stickers on the back of the miniSUV.You have to enlarge the photo to get a good look, but there's a wonderful assortment there. Several variations of the "I (heart) Oregon" theme, those odd pink clasping hands/triangles (aren't those some sort of "marriage encounter" symbol?) I'm guessing that the driver (who was a woman) or the car's owner is from Mexico or a Mexican soccer fan: the globe and "CA" is the logo for Club America, the megaclub based in Mexico City. But my two favorites are the Tick down on the bumper and, way up in the upper left hand corner of the window, a parody of the "fleeing wetbacks" freeway signs you see in southern California only with the migrant family racing for the surf break complete with longboards. Taken altogether I'm not sure what this person's car is saying, but the conversation is pretty eclectic, and I think I'd have liked to have had the opportunity to enjoy taking part...