For those of you who live around the country, or indeed the world, there’s a new show on the Independent Film Channel called Portlandia. It’s presented as a sketch comedy, but it really feels more like a documentary about our fair city, albeit one with its tongue planted firmly in its cheek.
The m.o. for the show is to highlight some of the quirks, the oddities, and sometimes even the preciousness that Portland seems to have, and that must make people who live elsewhere scratch their heads at some of the things that go on here.
As if by magic, an ad appeared on Craigslist the other day, and was re-posted on the Facebook page for the show. The ad is hilarious and a bit creepy, and almost uncannily Portland.
rooms & shares/Alberta Arts district:
one and a half rooms in basement under faith oriented home, with high moral values. Felons and lumberjacks welcome. possibility of limited bathroom usage. must be comfortable around the transgender community. discount on rent with help in our vegan sausage meat packing production. the half room in basement is shared with my gerbil farm. must be open to swingers night on saturday
About J Lockin: funtional male meat cutter in transgender transition. and not in recovery. Main manager of gerbil farm.
About Annabell: Organic Farmer, 24, recently divorced looking for a gentleman (with stamina!) to help in garden
About Katrina O: young dancer at downtown club, 23, enjoys tattoos and indie rock, and anal sex
You?
[phone number deleted]
The fact that they’re swingers just makes every single part of this ad seem like a euphemism, but my favorite part is that they’re all vegan meat packers. This thing has to be a joke. It just has to be. There are too many double entendres (not to mention the huge issues!) for it to have the slightest hint of the remotest possibility of the smallest germ of SPECULATION about being real.
The other day, I had a funny memory from my college years that I can’t believe I haven’t told here before.
One afternoon, I saw a female friend of mine walking across CollegeCampus and thought it would be funny if I surprised her. I snuck up behind her, put my arm around both of her shoulders and said, “Don’t try anything stupid, and no one will get hurt.” She stopped walking, turned around, and gave me a gentle but penetrating stare that let me know that this was not an okay thing to do. That’s the moment in which I realized it wasn’t my friend at all.
You see, there was a student at our school who could have been my friend’s absolute doppelganger. Both of them were the same height and build, had the same color/length/style of hair, and both wore the same kind of classy, neo-hippie clothing. From the front, they looked like they could be long-lost sisters, but from behind, they looked exactly the same, which I had to find out the hard way.
The Doppelganger stood and stared at me as I removed my arm from her shoulders and apologized profusely. “I’m SO sorry,” I told her. “You look exactly like a friend of mine. Don’t worry, no one’s going to get hurt.” I stepped back a pace.
To my amazement and relief, she gave me a little smile and said, “Yeah, I know. I’ve seen her around, actually.”
“Thank God,” I said. “You could’ve easily elbowed me in the ribs, or the groin, and you’d have totally been within your rights to do that. I’m glad you didn’t, but you certainly could have. Sorry, again.”
“That’s okay.” She smiled and turned back in the direction she’d been walking before I accosted her.
Earlier today, I heard someone mention the phrase, “We only use ten percent of our brains,” and that got me thinking of a number of reasons why that statement isn’t true. First of all, most human beings are very highly evolved, and every part of our bodies (with the possible exception of the coccyx) has a specific function and purpose. Things that don’t serve any purpose get evolutionarily ‘weeded out’, you might say, and tens of thousands of years of that process have left us pretty dang streamlined.
Different brain functions are handled by different sections of the brain, so while at this very second you may be using only ten percent of yours by watching television, or by having sex, or by reading this blog, you’ll be using different parts of it to know where your limbs are (without looking), or to recognize your childrens’ faces, or to simply keep your balance, or to recognize subtle social cues, or to play the cello. You’ll have used your entire brain in just a few minutes without even, dare I say, thinking about it.
Where did the ten-percent myth originate, and why does it persist? According to Barry Beyerstein, it seems to be a skewed modern outgrowth of an idea put forth by Victorian-era psychologist William James, who was fond of saying that people rarely achieve more than a small amount of their potential. From there, the idea spread into the public vernacular, where it somehow morphed into ‘ten percent of their potential’, and then into ten percent of the brain. Once that meme spread out across the world, it never really went away, despite the enormous scientific and technological breakthroughs on the subject during the intervening decades.
I love to find out about the modern discoveries that prove how ‘plastic’ and changeable the brain is, especially following a brain injury. If you lose your sight, for example, your brain will learn to process things you TOUCH with the visual cortex. A friend of mine used to have a little blind cat who knew her way around the entire house, could walk right over to you wherever you were, could jump to window sills (and even knew which window sills had decorative stuff in them she needed to avoid, or were sills that she was unable to jump to), and could even climb up and down the fire escape without ever missing a step. My own cat, who had normal vision, wouldn’t go near the steps of the fire escape because she could see how steep the angle was, and how high up our third-floor apartment really was, and it was all too much for her. The blind cat would run up and down without a care in the world. She had the place completely mapped out in her brain, and knew exactly where everything was.
The ten-percent theory seems to rank up there with other misinformed phrases like ‘sweat like a pig’ and ‘eat like a bird.’ Pigs don’t sweat, which is why they lie around in the mud to keep cool, and birds have to eat twice their own weight every day in order to have enough energy for all that flying. My favorite thing to say, when someone says they eat like a bird, is, “Oh, really? Twice your own weight every day? Or do you mean you peck at the food on your plate, without using your hands or utensils?”
The good news, possibly the most heartening of all about the brain theory, is that if you DO only use ten percent of your brain, but you use it to think about THE Brain, that should bump you up to at least a good fifteen or twenty percent right there.
2010 has been very strange. At the beginning of the year, I was still on blogging hiatus, so it took a while to get back up to speed. Springtime was crazy, with lots of great musical endeavors and memorable trips. By the summer, both my life and this blog went into overdrive, when I really started writing again, and found my full stride while sharing a bit too much about my childhood. Suddenly it was October, which is the month of my birth, but this year was also the month of my stepdad’s death, which has sent everything into a tailspin since then. A surreal trip to Yakima for the funeral was followed by multiple trips to Seattle, both for gigs and for family functions.
There were some standout moments from this last year that didn’t manage to make it into the blog, for various reasons. For example, here’s a video of a particularly interesting recording session that I was lucky enough to be involved with, albeit in a small way. A local singer-songwriter, who is also a friend, put the word out on SocialNetwork that she wanted to create a cacaphony of 50 pianos, all playing an F chord at the same time. I jumped at the chance. She rented a piano showroom downtown, and my friend and I (and forty eight or so other people) joined in to participate. I brought my camera to capture a bit of the action.
Another memorable moment from this last year was Trek in the Park. This theater group gets together every year to re-create a famous episode from the original Star Trek television series. This year’s was Space Seed, in which we meet the infamous character Khan (who returned in the movie The Wrath of Khan). It was a very well-done production, with live music and everything. . .and it was all free of charge. Here’s the climactic fight sequence between Kirk and Khan.
IrishBand released our self-titled EP this year, as well as an amazing animated video that a friend created for us. I would post that here, but our band name is very unusual, hence the pseudonym. To celebrate, we went to Port Townsend, Washington (the hometown of three of the band members, and an adopted home away from home for the rest of us) to play a CD release party and catch the Rhododendron Festival and parade and everything. It’s always a huge party weekend for PT, and this year was the tenth reunion for PT High School, which included Violinist and a bunch of other friends, so I actually went to the reunion barbecue in Chetzemoka Park during the afternoon, since I knew so many of the people there. (God forbid that I actually go to any of my own class reunions; I haven’t yet.) I also performed in the parade, in disguise, as an honorary member of Nanda. I’m the guy with the Mexican wrestling mask, playing the bass, miming along to the dance music that was blaring from the speakers in the back of the truck.
I had the opportunity to see the Oregon Symphony perform many times this last year, with some pretty big-name performers. Violinists Midori and Hilary Hahn, violinist Pinchas Zukerman and his cellist wife Amanda Forsyth (who, incidentally, gave a cello master class at the Old Church that afternoon, which I also attended, even though I’m far from being a cello master) who performed Brahms’s Double Concerto together, and a number of others. This month, I have a ticket for pianist Emanuel Ax’s concert, which I’m very much looking forward to. Yo-Yo Ma performed here a month or so ago, but his concert was sold out in the spring, only a few weeks after tickets went on sale. Curses.
So it’s been a good year, overall, but I’m really hoping that 2011 is better, or less confusing at the very least. I have lofty goals for the upcoming year, which include finding a job, finding love and a real relationship, taking care of some things that have been dogging me for a while now, and producing more CD’s. I have a bit of news on the music front, actually. A friend of mine hurt her arms a year ago, and has since been unable to play the piano, but that hasn’t stopped her from singing, or from writing lyrics and melodies, or from having tons of ideas. She e-mailed me at some point to ask what people in her position do in the music business. I told her I don’t know about ‘the music business’, but I’d love to give the songs a listen, and that maybe I could put music to them. She sent me some mp3’s, and I instantly felt like I knew where the songs should go. They felt familiar without being predictable, which is always a good sign. That was about two months ago, and we already have five or six collaborations in the works. Pretty awesome and exciting.
In other news, December is the fourth anniversary of this blog, so it seems appropriate to have a little birthday party, no? Come on, let’s have some sis-boom-bah.
So anyway, on to the Best Of. Here are the lists of what I consider to the best entries BFS&T has to offer from this past year, which naturally includes a list of the most interesting dreams, as well. Enjoy!
THE ENTRIES:
SteamCon – the steampunk convention in Seattle in which PolishCellist and I played, and had a total blast doing so
Just in case this wasn’t enough for your insatiable appetite for blog entries, here’s the Best of BFS&T 2009 entry, for your gluttonous pleasure.
Thanks for being here and reading all this, and for supporting this blog for such a long time now. I really appreciate it. I hope we all have an excellent New Year’s Eve, and Day, and that 2011 allows us to learn, and to grow, and to change for the better, a little bit each day.
Synchronicity is a term that was coined by Carl Jung to describe an ‘acausal connecting principle’, which is the short way of explaining a situation in which two unrelated events have an almost preternatural link, in a way that was unknown at the time of the first event. That sounds confusing, but it’s really a beautiful idea, and I’ve been lucky enough to experience it a handful of times, and here’s my favorite example.
When I was a kid, I used to have a green Huffy bike that was really heavy and cumbersome. Some of the other kids had BMX bikes, and they could race around, pop wheelies, and catch air off of ‘sweet jumps’ with ease. (That’s a Napoleon Dynamite reference, by the way.)
My tank of a bike made such stunts laughably difficult, although they did happen occasionally, albeit with a little help from my friends. One kid named Sean who lived across the street claimed to have bionic powers. This was in the late 1970’s, after all, and the Bionic Man TV show was in full swing. Sean was notorious for claiming the powers whenever he would throw a football for a slightly longer distance than normal, or run extra fast, but his favorite thing was to stand in the middle of his yard and gesture at the two large trees in it. “I can pick up this tree in this hand,” he would say, “and that tree over there in my other hand.”
“Well, let’s see you do that,” my brother and I said.
He would hold his arms out and flex his fingers before he poked at his wrist and said, “Hunh. My bionics don’t seem to be working today.”
“Oh, man, that’s a shame,” we said. “We wanted to see you lift up the trees. Maybe next time.”
That being said, one day all of us were riding our bikes in circles, jumping off curbs and trying to pop wheelies, and after numerous tries, I finally was able to get the front wheel of my Huffy off the ground at the precise moment it needed to be lifted, and the front wheel sailed into the air. I kept it aloft for quite some time, and I was elated. When the wheel found its way back to the ground, I pushed backwards on my pedals, stopped my bike, and shouted with glee. “Hey, everybody, did you see that? Oh, man, that was super high!” Most people cheered and said that yes, they’d seen it, but Sean was having none of it.
“Did you see me go like THIS right before you pulled up on the handlebars?” he asked, making a sort of throwing motion with his arm.
The rest of us kinda looked at each other, and I said, “Uh, no, I didn’t see that.”
“Oh, well, I transferred my bionics to you, and that’s what gave you the strength to do that.”
“Oh, okay,” I said, trying not to laugh. “Thanks!”
After much cajoling of my parents, I finally got a new bike when I was about nine years old. I’d been looking at it for months in a catalog I’d gotten from the Schwinn store. It was a Tornado, and it was love at first sight.
I don’t remember exactly when I got it, whether it was for my birthday or For No Reason, but I loved it, and I rode it everywhere. It was quite an improvement over the clunky Huffy. Suddenly jumps and wheelies were no problem, and I could skid around the slippery sidewalks at CatholicSchool like a pro. A handful of us clipped playing cards into the spokes of our wheels with clothespins, in order to make our bikes sound like hot rods. Incidentally, I think it may be time to clip a card or two into the wheels of my new bike and race around the neighborhood, just to see what kind of a reaction I get.
In true BFS&T fashion, I told you that story so that I can tell you this one, and this is where the synchronicity factors in.
One day, my brother and I were playing football in the front yard, like we did often. On this particular day, we were in full uniform, with pants, jerseys (he wore a Seattle Seahawks jersey, while I was partial to the Pittsburgh Steelers), knee pads, shin guards, shoulder pads, and helmets. We were quite well decked out, I have to say. So we’d been playing for a while that afternoon, when I got the sudden urge to ride my bike. Normally I would have gone inside to change out of my football uniform first, but this time I chose to climb on my Tornado and zoom away in full regalia. I thought I should just leave my helmet and everything on; I’m not sure why.
I had been riding for fifteen or twenty minutes, when the thought occurred to me, Why didn’t I take all this stuff off? I must look like a complete idiot. I’m going home right now and changing. About one second after I had finished that thought and turned toward home, my handlebars slipped ninety degrees sideways, and my bike fell to the ground. I flew through the air for a couple of seconds, flipped over onto my back, and my head slammed down onto the cement sidewalk much harder than it had any right to.
I lay there dazed, looking up at the sky, completely unhurt. I suddenly realized how glad I was that I’d chosen not to change out of my football helmet, and I rode home with newfound vigor. I don’t think I told my mom what happened, because I didn’t want her to worry. Nothing had happened to me, after all, so why bother her with a non-issue? But I never forgot, and I got a bike helmet pretty soon after that incident.
By way of a summary for this entry, here’s a video of the Police, tearing it up in 1984 (I’m guessing it’s 1984 by what they’re wearing), when they were at the absolute top of their game. This, naturally, is the song, “Synchronicity I.”
