Take the first left after Venus, you can’t miss it.
Venus:
- Diameter: 5.2 inches
- Location: Budget Traveler Motor Inn (0.7 mile from Sun)
- Construction: Styrofoam ball with fiberglass cover
- Constructed by: Caribou Tech Center (Caribou High School)
- Painted by: Jeanie McGowan, Curator of Collections at the Northern Maine Museum of Science and student at the University of Maine at Presque Isle
- Posts constructed by: Northern Maine Technical College, Sonny Michaud and students
- Base constructed by David Tardie and his students, Loring Job Corps, Cement Mason Program
—Via MetaFilter, the coolest thing I’ve seen this morning: a 40-mile-long scale model of the solar system, from the Sun at the Northern Maine Museum of Science at Presque Isle, to Pluto (and Charon) outside the Houlton Information Center at the junction of Route 1 and Interstate 95. It’s the brainchild of Kevin McCartney, a professor of geology at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, and it was constructed pretty much entirely of donated materials and volunteer labor on a budget of zip, zero, zilch. Here’s the Smithsonian’s write-up:
Just now, newspaper ad sales manager Jim Berry is drilling a hole in Saturn’s post and remembering his first encounter with McCartney at a Kiwanis Club meeting. “I went home that night and said to my wife, ‘I met this guy today. He’s a wacko. You can’t believe what he’s going to try to do.’ “ When he got up the next morning he said, “Wait a minute. This is a great idea. I’ve got to get involved in this. This is just too good to pass up.”
McCartney has that effect on people; one day they think he’s crazy, the next day they’re painting Jupiter’s spot. His list of prominent “squirrels,” as he inexplicably calls his volunteers, runs eight pages long. Add the anonymous students who worked on a planet here or a stanchion there, and McCartney estimates that more than 500 squirrels have pitched in so far. Perley Dean, a retired Presque Isle High School guidance counselor who wears a “Maine Potato Board” baseball cap, got the job of persuading several landowners that what was missing on their property was a planet. “Many of them don’t stay up late at night reading about the galaxy,” Dean deadpans.
To infinity and beyond!
33 vases 33.
I’ve been at a slow boil over a nasty little meme scuttling about the mediasphere the past few days. Goes something like this: “Hey! Only 33 important artefacts were looted from the Iraqi National Museum! (And several thousand minor ones!) Bet those liberals aren’t going to apologize for lying about this any time soon!” It causes the red film to descend over my vision, and the pains in my chest to start up; I get this cramp in my left arm, just thinking about it, and quail at the notion of how much of my own bile and slaver I’d have to shovel to get at a clear, concise, poisonously succinct fuck you.
Luckily, it’s an Augean stable Teresa Nielsen Hayden is well-equipped to clean. A mighty river of truth and perspective is all that’s needed to wash these Billy Rubins clean and reveal their various high-minded calls to “set the record straight” as the pathetic projections they are.
Go. Read. Now.
A long drink of water.
From Orcinus, I learn that somebody off on the dextral side of the Islets of Bloggerhans is challenging folks who find themselves on one end or the other to say something nice about their better halves. —Apparently, bipartisanship isn’t so much like date rape in Paul Muller’s book:
So here’s my challenge – if you are a proprietor of a Democratic blog, and primarily post on how the GOP is the great evil, comment to me on one thing that the GOP has done that’s good. And, if you are feeling adventurous, post something on your actual site that does the same thing. Maybe a local Congressman or Senator has done something good for the area you live in. Perhaps a bill has been supported that you agree with. Maybe you actually gasp like the policy someone has. Whatever it is, let’s hear it.
So I’m game, though I’m afraid I might be spoiling the spirit if not the letter. While Muller seems more concerned with the GOP on a national level, I’d rather highlight the efforts of one Bob Riley, the conservative, Christian, Republican governor of my home state of Alabama. (Thanks to Julia for pointing me to the New York Times spit-take.)
The basic gist of what this red-stater is up to is summed up thusly by a blue-state elitist:
Alabama’s tax system has long been brutally weighted against the least fortunate. The state income tax kicks in for families that earn as little a $4,600, when even Mississippi starts at over $19,000. Alabama also relies heavily on its sales tax, which runs as high as 11 percent and applies even to groceries and infant formula. The upshot is wildly regressive: Alabamians with incomes under $13,000 pay 10.9 percent of their incomes in state and local taxes, while those who make over $229,000 pay just 4.1 percent.
A main reason Alabama’s poor pay so much is that large timber companies and megafarms pay so little. The state allows big landowners to value their land using “current use” rules, which significantly lowball its worth. Individuals are allowed to fully deduct the federal income taxes they pay from their state taxes, something few states allow, a boon for those in the top brackets.
Governor Riley’s plan, which would bring in $1.2 billion in desperately needed revenue, takes aim at these inequalities. It would raise the income threshold at which families of four start paying taxes to more than $17,000. It would scrap the federal income tax deduction and increase exemptions for dependent children. And it would sharply roll back the current-use exemption, a change that could cost companies like Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade, which own hundreds of thousands of acres, millions in taxes. Governor Riley says that money is too tight to lift the sales tax on groceries this time, but that he intends to work for that later.
Doesn’t sound much like a conservative Republican, does it?
Perhaps that’s because he takes his Christianity seriously. “Alabamians are used to hearing their politicians make religious arguments,” says the New York Times,
and Governor Riley thinks he can convince the voters that Christian theology calls for a fairer tax system. “I’ve spent a lot of time studying the New Testament, and it has three philosophies: love God, love each other, and take care of the least among you,” he said. “I don’t think anyone can justify putting an income tax on someone who makes $4,600 a year.”
In fact, now that he’s steered his plan through the divided, squabbling halls of Goat Hill, and it now hinges on the votes in an upcoming September election, Riley’s counting on religious groups to help grass-roots the plan to victory; Susan Pace Hamill has written a law review article titled “An Argument for Tax Reform Based on Judeo-Christian Ethics,” and is planning to train speakers this summer to address church groups with this argument.
It’s not the specter of a Republican raising taxes and the progressive shifting of the burden from them what hasn’t to them what has that I’m cheering, though. That’s reason enough, mind, but I’d like to think there isn’t a human being alive who could take a look at a system that taxes a family making $4,600 a year and not want to do something about it. (And yes: that does say a lot about Alabama politics to date.) —And it’s not like I’ve vetted his plan in any great detail, though there are details I quite like—still, there’s some education reform in there I’d want to know more about before signing off on them, education being one of those areas where the word “reform” has been deformed beyond all meaning, and anyway tax policy’s far from my strong suit.
No, it’s that anything at all is being done. It’s that a politician took a look at the problems besetting the voters, the resources available to hand, and then waded in and knocked heads and did something, or tried. Things have gotten to that state: there has been such a gross dereliction and abdication of duty at the federal level (I’m talking Donkey and Elephant here, Paul, so I don’t think I cross your line) that the states are facing unprecedented challenges. Each is rising to the occasion in its own gridlocked, squabbling, bipartisan way: the New York state legislature has told Governor Pataki to fuck off in no uncertain terms, for instance; here in Oregon, we’re going to kill the Hummer deduction. Whether you agree with Governor Riley—and the Alabama legislature, there on Goat Hill—or think he’s making a dreadful mistake, you must admit that they’ve remembered what it is governments are good for, and shown a remarkable alacrity for making it work. —If you doubt it, remember: if the voters of Alabama say yea to the Governor’s plan, a family making $4,600 a year will no longer have to set some of that aside to pay state income taxes.
And it’s also the thrill of seeing a compassionate conservative; of seeing someone who wields religion in politics not as a club for once, but as a beacon. One does not have to agree with someone’s convictions to admire their courage for sticking to them, and one merely needs to turn to John Giles of Alabama’s Christian Coalition for an illuminating counter-example: he feels tax reform isn’t necessary, saying the state “need(s) to cut out the pork completely”; he misses the point of one of the most misused verses of Scripture ever, insisting the key question is “How much is Cæsar’s?”; his response to Susan Pace Hamill’s detailed ethical argument on tax reform is to question her stance on abortion.
I’d like to think any Republican—any Christian—would prefer to be in the party of Riley. Not the party of Giles.
There’s that famous speech Michael J. Fox delivers in Aaron Sorkin’s overrated and underappreciated can President. “People want leadership,” he says. “And in the absence of genuine leadership, they will listen to anyone who steps up to the microphone. They want leadership, Mr. President. They’re so thirsty for it, they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand.” We’ll leave off for the moment the President’s pointed response; he Learns His Lesson in the end, and all becomes right with the world. —I’m sure there are aspects of Riley’s governorship that would make me livid. I bet there are things I believe that would cause him to mutter darkly about moral depravity. But for all those differences imagined or not, I can see he’s holding out water for people who’ve been thirsty for far too long.
And that, at least, is something I can drink to.
Portrait of the cartoonist as a young woman.
And no sooner do I post that last than Jenn calls to check up on some blurbage for an upcoming comics show. I give her something defensive and rah-rah, about simple mysteries and unfair denigration, something that flies my McCloudian colors, and then she says, “Go read Dylan’s journal.” —She’s talking about fellow Girlamaticker Dylan Meconis, Pants Presser and contributor to the aforementioned Wary Tales.
“In a minute,” I say. “I’m at work.” (It’s true. I am. But on a break, now. Honest.)
“No, really,” she says. “Go read it now. You’ll like it.”
She was right. So now I’m telling you: go read it.
In just over a month
I’ll be sitting in the cavernous belly of the San Diego Convention Center, happily blocking out the surrounding chaos with a copy of Wary Tales. I’ll most likely be at the table Chris and Jenn are sharing over in the small-press section. Stop by if you get the chance.
Tuppence.
I’m sorry to see Wampum go. Come back soon, MB.
While I maybe don’t read Ruminate This or the watch on a daily white-knuckled basis, they’re invaluable pit stops for every-coupla-day perspective-taking. Keep up the good work, folks.
I used to have Mac-a-ro-nies in my linchinography. Like a lot of people, I find her a sharp-witted writer on political issues, with a knack for digging up (criminally) overlooked perspectives. But her tongue’s as sharp as her wit—too sharp, perhaps. Links drift in and out of my blogroll all the time, for the most whimsical of reasons; it isn’t a secret club, or an intellectually rigorous snapshot of me as a political animal, or a networked affinity group, or even an accurate representation of what I’m reading how often. It’s just a collection of stuff I want to remember to keep coming back to. For a variety of reasons, including what I saw to be disproportionate reactions to others’ posts (friends and not) and dispiriting ad hominem attacks, I decided a while back to remove the Mac-a-ro-nies link. —I still read her from time to time, when pointed to fresh posts by others.
So I wish MacDiva the best of luck. We each of us can only fight the world the way we see it, after all.
But every now and then it’s a good idea to stop and take a look at the way we see the world.
—And that’s all two cents is worth, I think.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern walk into a bar.
The two guys: and you should know that “guys” is being used in its gender-neutral sense. (It does have one, and that sense, I think, is growing. Saying “Oh, come on, guys,” to a mixed group is not unusual, and includes the girls as much as the boys. Encourage its neutrality, says I.) The two guys, then: a terribly common and terribly ancient trope. (One hesitates and in the end does not say universal, mostly because while one is sometimes cheeky, one isn’t stupid.) It’s more interesting when stuff is happening in a—story, shall we say—to be able to talk about it, banter, crack jokes, bitch and moan—and so it’s axiomatic that two characters are more interesting than one. (Three, however, is not necessarily better than two. Four gets downright muddled, unless handled with great skill.) And because we like to be able to tell the difference between A and B, apples and oranges, a hawk and a handsaw, it’s only natural that of these two the one should end up as foil to the other—and naturally enough, vice versa. This isn’t to say that the one must always be funny, and the other dour; one stolid, and one flighty; one cynical, and one earnest; one earthy, and one spiritual; one loud, and one quiet. This isn’t to say that there’s an ur-This and an ur-That to which all such pairings hearken. Merely that, of whatever thing(s) the storyteller (story?) chooses to kick around with the two guys, well, one of them will be on the one side; the other on the other. Just the way things fall out: dichotomy, you know?
Still: it’s fun to map this pair onto that and see what overlaps we find.
—I’m spurred to this line of thought by Molly and Griffen, the protagonists of the Spouse’s sci fi slice-o’-life picaresque. Which is, perhaps, self-indulgent—but if that surprises, hell. You probably shouldn’t be reading blogs. Anyway: Griffen, of course, is C3PO, which makes Molly R2D2. That means that Dan’s Molly, then, and Casey’s Griffen. Scully would be Dan, and Mulder Casey (I’m thinking less of essence than affect, mind); Ponch would be Mulder, and Jon would be Scully. I can never remember which is Starsky, and which Hutch, but Bo is Ponch and Luke is Jon, assuming Bo’s the blond one, and that means Dana’s Bo and Natalie’s Luke, though I don’t think hair color’s all that reliable as a flag of which is which. (Xena and Gabrielle don’t really work so well as two guys, but I don’t think that’s because of subtext. Please.)
And Guildenstern is clearly Griffen; Rosencrantz, indubitably Molly.
Jenn’s between chapters, so she’s let Barry come in and do a short story, “The Argument,” which will be running at Girlamatic for the next couple of weeks. Does this mean that we now have two sets of two guys—Barry’s, and Jenn’s—standing metafictionally at either side of a stage, spinning coins? Not so much, I don’t think. (Every conceit has to break down somewhere.) But I am amused—heartily—to note the extent to which Barry adores Molly. Dotes on her. Lavishes attention upon her. Jenn loves her ladies as equally as anyone can, but Molly’s quiet, stolid, earnest, earthy, and spiritual: she’s not the showboat Griffen is. (Though Molly’s the highlight of one of the more beautiful bits of drawing thus far.) Yet give Barry the reins, and there’s Griffen, perched on the arm of a sofa, in the background, and look how Molly shines.
Then, push comes to shove and we get down to cases, I’m a Griffen partisan. So of course I’m going to be struck by something like that.
You know what I mean?
Thirteen thousand in your name.
If you’re an American citizen, you should know this: in your name, in our name, 13,000 Arab, Muslim, and Middle Eastern men will be deported from this country. That’s roughly 16% of the 82,000 total who came forward voluntarily during the waves of Special Registration late last year and early this—only to be arrested without warning and detained for for a time without charges.
These 13,000 deportations ostensibly have to do with terrorism—but only 11 of those 82,000 have been linked with terrorism.
These 13,000 deportations are ethnically biased—“What the government is doing is very aggressively targeting particular nationalities for enforcement of immigration law,” said Lucas Guttentag, director of the immigrants’ rights project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “The identical violation committed by, say, a Mexican immigrant is not enforced in the same way.”
These 13,000 deportations are subject to political manipulation—Armenians, for instance, were originally targetted for Special Registration, but were removed after intense lobbying.
These 13,000 deportations are intended to close loopholes—“We need to focus our enforcement efforts on the biggest threats,” said Jim Chaparro, acting director for interior enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security. “People may not like that strategy, but that is what we need to do. If a loophole can be exploited by an immigrant, it can also be exploited by a terrorist”—but many of these loopholes result from negligence, overextension, and incompetence at the Department and its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
These 13,000 deportations are being overseen by the remnants of an agency known for its criminal disregard for the rights of aliens.
These 13,000 deportations will tear families and communities apart. They will affect far more than 13,000—only men were targetted by the Special Registration. Their wives, sisters, mothers, and children will need to choose between staying behind or leaving with them. These 13,000 deportations will foster resentment and hatred in the very people who had our best interests at heart, sending people back to the very countries they fled to escape persecution, oppression, economic hardship, whose governments they came here to speak out against, to countries that some haven’t seen since infancy. The threat alone has already sent thousands of immigrants over borders and deeper into hiding. These 13,000 deportations will not fight terrorism. They will not make us any safer. They are cruel and mean-spirited. They are unnecessary. They are short-sighted. They will, in fact, make the world more dangerous. They are wrong.
It’s not even as if we’re closing the barn door after the horses broke loose. It’s as if we decided not to bother closing the door at all and instead went around shooting the horses that stayed behind.
These 13,000 deportations are being done in your name.
Tell your congressional delegation what you think about that.
(Thanks to TalkLeft. Earlier Long stories: Niemöller time, Tomorrow belongs to—, Anecdotal.)
Laura Ashley is definitely back… She’s back, and this time it’s personal. See, they mated her with the Home Depot guy, and that’s where you get Martha Stewart.
Far be it from me to defend Martha. But some recent news regarding her case is, shall we say, unsettling:
Inserting an unusual twist into their indictment of the domestic diva, prosecutors charge that she committed a crime when she stood up in public last summer and denied engaging in insider trading.
“I was a little surprised at that,” said Richard A. Serafini, a former economic crimes prosecutor in New York. “There’s kind of a natural tendency when you’re confronted with something to deny it. Now they’re charging it as market manipulation.”
On the other hand, one looks forward to what this level of prosecutorial zeal will dig up when (finally) brought to bear on Ken Lay, et al.
(Title gacked from the unaired Buffy pilot, of course.)
Let’s add a link to this in-depth piece from Steve Gilliard over at the Daily Kos.
Film at elevenses.
Medley’s noting another disquieting example of the government threatening experts who speak out against a proposed government policy. This time, it’s about the dismantling of Head Start, which, despite years of sketchy funding and grudging support, is still one of the more impressive federal success stories. Ah, well; scratch off another opportunity for your tax dollars to do some good in this world. —Elayne ties it to a venerable PBS institution in trouble because of a lack of cartoon figures ripe for exploitation on jammies and lunchboxes.
From one Sara to another: Sara Ryan links to the text of a great speech Sara Peretsky’s been delivering these days.
Ampersand is all up in Congress’s face about the “Partial-Birth” Abortion Ban: it’s patently unconstitutional, and he makes his case quite clearly here, here, and here (with a sidetrack to [shudder] the Corner here). A fourth part of his series will be coming up next week, looking at what we might expect from the Supremes, given that O’Connor will almost certainly resign before this travesty of law reaches their chambers; look for it.
I never got around to pointing out that Fantagraphics needs your help, but since everybody and her sister was on top of it, my slacking doesn’t matter so much in this hill of beans. The which said, here’s a quickie update on how they’re faring, and a reminder that now’s a great time to pick up a copy of Safe Area Goradze, a Maakies collection, or the TPB of Small Favors.
Judging from the comments section, and much to his puzzled bemusement, Kevin’s two-week old post on the Dixie Chicks and FUTK still has freakishly gawky legs. I point it out less for any insight the ongoing discussion might offer (pretty much nil) than for the entertainment value it offers as a curious singularity.
And, well, it’s mildly instructive to note the differences in headlines covering Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix’s final address to the Security Council: “US deaf to arms inspections pleas,” says the New Zealand Herald; “Blix decries coalition’s intelligence on Iraq arms,” says the International Herald Tribune; “Blix: Inspections could yet turn up banned weapons in Iraq,” MSNBC; “Blix: ‘No surprise’ if WMD found,” CNN. —Take from that what you will, which is the point, really.
Scott McCloud is right!
We do, on the whole, look less dorky in his photo than Erika’s.
Updates, faxblasts, petitions, that sort of thing—
The samizdata fuck-off.
Well sir, the Senate is mighty pissed at those irresponsible FCC commissioners. “It looks for all the world like you could not or would not stand up to corporate interests,” said Senator Byron L. Dorgan (D-ND), and no wonder. But it’s more grandstanding than anything else, given that the House seems much more amenable to the media borg, and Committee Chair John McCain (R-Ariz.) doesn’t support a bill doing anything about a situation that’s already this bogglingly bad and only getting worse. Here’s where you try to can convince him otherwise, and here’s where you can light a fire under your own representative and senators.
40 hours and a mule.
Whoa. We sorta won one. HR 1119 has been pulled from the schedule owing to the fact that the Republicans couldn’t find 218 representatives willing to sell out hourly employees—but they’re vowing to pursue passage later this year. “Only in Washington could lobbyists and politicians continue to get away with denying parents the freedom to choose to spend more time with their children.,” said Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio), chairman of the House Education and Workforce Committee. “I can assure you that the fight to change this outdated requirement on behalf of America’s working moms and dads is not over.” He appears to have been noticeably less effusive on his fight to allow large businesses to take out interest-free loans from the labor of their employees. Here’s where you can send off a letter to Wage and Hour Division Administrator Tammy McCutchen (and cc it to President Bush, for a laugh).
If you read one book review this season
make it John Dolan’s review of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. (Thanks, ’hat!)
78 luftballoons.
Yeah, it’s running up the blogdex like a thing that climbs up something else really fast, but it’s worth it: the ’80s Tarot. There are some truly inspired choices in there, and if your memory is long enough to have looked past the rather blandly mediocre nature of That ’80s Show to appreciate just how frighteningly, subtly spot-on the production designers and set dressers were in capturing That ’80s Look—not so much the bar or the record shop, those were gimmies; I’m thinking of the condo they lived in, the generic hotel-lobby furniture, that weird mix of wall and decor colors, neutral cools and mellow pastels that manage to be prickly and uncomfortable despite their best efforts: slick salespeople too studied, too mannered in their insouciance, smiling too much, their hands behind their backs holding other shoes about to drop. —Where was I? If you caught more than one episode for some variation on this queasily fascinated nostalgia kick, then the Tarot will make you laugh in delight, and you’ll think of Howard Jones for the first time in ages.
Luftballoon bonus: the 99 Luftballoons installation at Project Blinkenlights.
40 hours and a mule.
If you haven’t fax-blasted your Representative yet regarding HR 1119, do so. The vote’s tomorrow; the overtime pay you save might be your own. Don’t let them turn your work week into a no-interest loan for businesses. Don’t let them utterly stall the economy by taking money out of the hands of people who need to spend it on basic necessities and putting it in the hands of people who are sitting on the idea of new investments because the economy is in a slump right now on account of all the people who aren’t spending money on basic necessities. Don’t let them render meaningless such formerly useful words as “compassionate” and “flexible.” Don’t let them squeeze anymore blood from this stone. From us.
Did you know—
—that over and above $2 million dollars in taxpayer-funded trips, FCC staffers have taken an additional 2,500 trips costing nearly $2.8 million, most of which came from the telecom and broadcast industries that the agency is supposed to regulate? The top destination was Las Vegas, with 330 trips to such plush accommodations as the Bellagio; then New Orleans, at 173; then New York, at 102. Also listed: Paris, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, London, Buenos Aires, and Beijing.
Nor does the FCC compile its own data or crunch its own numbers when assembling support for its proposed revisions to our media regulations. Instead, it relies on third-party information providers and self-reporting from—again—the telecom and broadcast industries it’s supposed to regulate. (Presumably, this helps explain why commissioners had to meet 71 times with industry reps leading up to Monday’s historic vote, but only five times with the two major consumer groups working for public interest.)
Wow. You’d think this would have made the news or something, to let us all know what was up with the vote: the Center for Public Integrity released these findings back on 22 May and 29 May, respectively. —Funny, that.
(Well, it did make Molly’s column, at least. I should remember to check in with her on a more regular basis.)
À la recherche du temps perdu.
There’s this smell—
Okay. So you’ve just eaten a bowl of Wheaties. And you’re in a hurry, you’ve got to get out the door and catch a bus to go to work. So you dump the bowl in the sink and make some half-assed promise to yourself to wash it when you get home. But you go out after work and there’s some beer or maybe you go to that place just up the street which has the Tom Waits which is basically a Manhattan made with Knob Creek and it’s blasphemous on a number of levels and pricey to boot, but who cares while you’re sipping it and admiring the shrine to the Unknown Gentleman Caller up there above the restrooms, but the point is there’s drinking and conviviality and you roll in late and wake up bleary and dash down some coffee because, you know, you have to catch the bus to go to work, and you’ve just barely got time to maybe catch a bagel on the way in, and then that night, let’s say it’s Friday night, you’re going out with some friends, maybe a video festival at somebody else’s place, and whether there’s booze or not doesn’t really matter but there is more conviviality, and you end up rolling in late again, so it’s Saturday morning after a cup of coffee before you’re ready to deal with the sink where you find that bowl you ate the Wheaties out of a couple of days before, and did I mention it’s summer and you don’t have air conditioning?
So you blow off the bowl and the rest of the dishes and head back into town, maybe go to Powell’s, there at the edge of Portland’s Pearl District, and this is back in 1998, by the way, or early 1999, when Anodyne was still hitting the streets and the Blitz-Weinhard brewery was cooking up a batch of Henry’s every couple of days—late nights or even some early afternoons you could wander through the streets of the Pearl accompanied by the musical clink of empty bottles shuttling at a mad pace along the conveyor belt that stretched over 11th (I think it was 11th) from one building to the next, and when the batch being brewed had hit just the right point in its zymurgic maturation, well, that whole little pocket of refabbed light-industrial and warehouses-becoming-lofts and hole-in-the-wall diners and nautical supply shops and the biggest used bookstore in the world would all pretty much smell like that dried-out faintly fermenting bowl you’d eaten the Wheaties from a couple of days before. (Cf. a half-eaten bag of Fritos; also, gym socks under certain difficult-to-reproduce conditions.)
Blitz-Weinhard is gone now. Henry’s is brewed in California somewhere, by Miller, and the old brewery buildings they didn’t tear down are being refitted as lofts and offices and upscale retail. They’re doing a better job of it than not—certainly, it’s a better world there than the one where Paul Allen replaces Memorial Coliseum with a fucking big-box retail park Jantzen Beach clone. There’s a grocery store downtown, now—pricey, and with a nasty labor-relations history, but they stock Bert Grant’s IPA and green wine, so color me conflicted—and if some of the new builds are ugly as sin, some of the refits are temptingly neo-urban hipster cozy—railroad lofts with reading lights shining cheerfully through hazy glass-brick walls opening onto loading docks, that sort of thing.
And the smell is gone. But.
Yes, it’s a story as old as real estate: as a city grows and its infrastructure improves, the transportation hubs and industrial nuclei can be shunted from points downtown to outlying campuses (in this case, various industrial parks heading up the Willamette River from Swan Island to Rivergate, at the confluence with the Columbia); the old warehouses and factories left behind close and decay, rent out dirt-cheap to artists and other disreputable bohemian types, and funky restaurants spring up and shut down and spring up again, galleries open, people start taking to its funky recycled industrial charm, the exposed brick and rusting I-beams and roads laid with railroad tracks so boxcars full of grain and bone meal can trundle through the streets at midnight making deliveries to the factories still manufacturing and the massive amounts of open square footage at low low monthly rates; somebody organizes a regular open gallery night, First Thursday of every month, the galleries get giddy, there’s cheap red wine and Ritz crackers a go-go, buskers start showing up, and there’s upscale galleries showing aggressively minimalist stuff in white white rooms cheek-by-jowl with scrappy low-rent award-winning photo studios and the just plain weird shit, like the art cars and that old warehouse that had the row of ratty theater seats sitting on the loading dock and the perpetual indie-rock band practicing in a loft somewhere upstairs (drums and bass echoing in the duct work, unseen guitars crunching to life and stuttering to a stop as the song stumbles and falls over and gets back up again) and the stuff, the stuff on the floors and the walls, light bulb sculptures and weird Da Vinci wing-things and giant canvasses like what Cy Twombly might have painted if Cy Twombly had been that stoner at the back of your junior high homeroom with the spiral-bound notebooks and that pen that clicks through four or five colors of ink. —You don’t want to know how much it costs to buy a condo in that warehouse now. Success raises rents, artists are replaced by boutiques, development money comes pouring in and if there’s a dot com boom that leads Wieden + Kennedy to relocate their offices smack in the middle of the whole shebang, it just exacerbates the process. And not to draw too deeply from the well of stereotype and cliché, but now there’s cell phones and sunglasses and lattés and valet parking for your SUV outside bars which still open on loading docks, and some of those old freight rail lines have been paved over because they were wrecking the suspensions of those SUVs. First Thursday is still a great walk, yes, and there’s loads of stuff yet to see and laugh at and be surprised by, and they still get the buskers and the sidewalk hustlers and the art cars. Heck, there’s even still a smell: William Pope.L has a branch of eRacism up at PICA, which involves paintings with peanut butter and mayonnaise, onions and pop tarts, a map made out of hotdogs, and a room full of liquor and stuffed animals. It’s been pretty rank walking past the ground floor of W+K these past few early summer weeks.
But it isn’t the same smell. —And there’s more missing: most of the local artists, for instance, who’ve chased cheap rents across the river to Northeast Alberta Street, where Last Thursday has something of the anarchic anything-goes vitality of First Thursdays gone by. Though not without doing some displacing themselves. —As old as real estate, then, and as cyclical as the seasons: though the first wave of boutiques in the Pearl District is starting to close now that the tide of dot com money has receded into memory, the second wave (more with the Thai restaurants and bank branches and less with the avant garde lighting solutions) is rolling in. And so (he said) it goes.
I was moved to sling these streams of consciousness about by the report in today’s Portland Tribune that the last freight rail car made its last delivery to pretty much the last working factory in the Pearl in the wee hours of Sunday morning: a cargo of pig, cow, and chicken carcasses for a bone and blood meal pet food factory. Cities change, and that’s good and that’s bad, and I’ve been living here for almost eight years—longer that I’ve ever lived in any one place before; perhaps that makes it all the more keen. There was something special about a downtown with an active industrial core intermixed with shops and offices and lofts. But that particular temp is now perdu; doff your hat as the rail car trundles by.
Just don’t wrinkle your nose too much. And watch out for the puddle of pig’s blood—that’ll be hosed down by tomorrow, never fear.
