To Whom it May Concern,

On Sunday, September 6th, myself and thousands of others who attended this year's Burning Man Festival began "Exodus", a much-maligned annual tradition. I maneuvered my car into a long line reaching up to the highway around 3:30 PM. It was a nasty day weather-wise and I and my colleagues spent the morning and afternoon watching sand storms from our office over at the Black Rock Beacon.

There was a brief break in the weather in the mid-afternoon and I made a break for it. When I pulled up to Exodus, the line was at a total standstill. I had been through this before and knew I had a long-wait ahead of me. I turned on BMIR for information and, much to my annoyance, there was a hip-hop show on the air hosted by several DJs who couldn't have cared less about what was happening over at the front gate. The volume on their mikes was higher than the buzz in their collective skulls. They prattled on endlessly about having sex with each other and all the yummy drugs they had ingested the night before.

Hey, this is Burning Man. People talking about getting laid and stoned on BMIR? This is par for the course but not during Exodus. Attendees turn to that station looking for information and nothing useful was trickling through the airwaves that afternoon. Just tons of self-indulgence, broken up with the occasional bit of music. Signs greeting visitors at the main gate tell them to tune into 94.5 FM for vital information and tips and, yes, it makes sense for DJs to goof around when there's none to relay but this was absurd.

After an hour wait in the heat and dust, I was starting to get antsy. The line hadn't budged. Something was wrong but no one on BMIR was talking about it. Finally, a member of the Black Rock Rangers showed up at the station to deliver a message but the DJs refused to let him on the air. I could hear him arguing with them as they jokingly demanded to see his credentials. He showed them his badge as he irritably told them he needed to grad a mike. They finally relented once he pulled down his pants and mooned them.

He revealed that the main gate was in total lock-down due to a missing child. OK, no prob, but that would have been nice to know AN HOUR PRIOR. Everybody in line for Exodus could have kept an eye out instead of becoming steadily more and more frustrated with the wait. 20 minutes later, the gate opened and inched forward about 50 yards.

Other attendees in the cars around me were getting cranky, very cranky. One guy wandered from car to car, desperate for information. Someone else trotted a few feet from their car to relieve themselves in full view of us all and onto the playa floor. Others started drinking to kill time, always a bad idea before a long drive through the desert.

I had read about the new "pulse" system the administration had planned to trot out this year. Despite their noble intentions, guess what? This plan stunk worse than a Port-a-Pot after a virgin Burner has tipped it over while puking their brains out. The only thing that could have made this year's unbearable Exodus more tolerable would have been updates on BMIR, every ten minutes, at the very least. After two hours of waiting and with my bladder on the verge of exploding, I drove under the flag divider and pointed my car towards the highway, stopping only briefly during a white-out.

I was disgusted when I reached the turn-off to discover only a handful of volunteers running Exodus. They were confused and overwhelmed. A naive guy, no more than 21, bounded out of his Rangers truck to stop me at the gate. "Who are you," he demanded to know. I calmly explained that I was tired of waiting and had a family emergency. I absolutely needed to make a call in Gerlach, ASAP. "Ok, go ahead," the young Ranger spat at me with a sneer. "You're special. Very special!"

Of course, there was no emergency, other than that I had a long drive ahead of me and, if I had fallen asleep at the wheel, it would have resulted in one hell of a family crisis. Not that he knew this. That said, during future Burns, I will be using this devious tactic to avoid the nasty, irritating process that is Exodus.

You can cry "but what about radical self-reliance" until your lungs bleed but there HAS to be a better way to execute Exodus. Rather than merely moan and groan, I'd like to offer this suggestion.....

Continue with the pulse plan but in smaller groups so the line moves more than once every hour. Yes, it's an excellent concept that prevents engine idling and tons of carbon from drifting into the atmosphere. I think we can all agree on that. Also: snag professional volunteers to man the boards at BMIR on Sunday afternoon to keep the tired, cranky crowd at Exodus informed. We could have also used more Port-a-Pots out there. Many, many more. As it stands, the pulse system is deeply flawed and led to drinking, confusion and endangered the safety of thousands of Burners.

You can do better. We can all do better.

Cheers,

-Brandon

Labels: burning man, off-topic, travels

Labels: off-topic, Oregon, sojurns, YouTube

Or, more specifically, a canal-side cafe in Leiden, about 50 KM south of Amsterdam. I've been here since Wednesday visiting my friend "M." What have we been up to? She convinced me to try raw herring, which is practically the national dish and, reportedly, a great hangover cure. It doesn't taste all that different than the sushi-equivalent but there's something about holding a long fish by the tail and biting into it that I couldn't quite stomach, especially in the middle of a crowded marketplace.

On Saturday evening, we went on a bike ride up to the town of Katwijk, which sits along the North Sea. The coastline here looks a lot like the beach at Manzanita. There's rolling dunes, gray skies and guys surfing in wet suits but, in the place of Nehakhanie Mountain, there's a shipping lane lined with cargo barges and a centuries-old church that looms over the town like a wise, old owl. I grabbed some schnitzel for dinner since, as far as I could tell, no one in this country knows what clam chowder is. M stuck with the fish and chips.

Yesterday, we went to a little shop in Amsterdam to have my first tattoo done. Part of my decision was, oddly enough, to find out what it feels like to get a tattoo. If you've never had the pleasure, imagine having someone cut into your skin with a thin needle as if they were slicing up a loaf of bread. The oddest part of the process is that, when the artist lifts the needle, the pain instantly stops. This will no doubt be my first, and last, tattoo. What did I get? Not telling but it's on my left leg just above the ankle.

During the first few weeks, at least, having a tattoo is like adopting a pet Mogwai. I'm not supposed to get it wet, expose it to sunset but, as far as I can tell, I could technically feed it after midnight.

I plan to continue blogging during my stay. There's a lot to cover...

Labels: off-topic, tattoos, travels

Labels: off-topic, Oregon, sojurns, YouTube

Would you take a car down this road?

Ok, better question, would you take *your* car down this road?

Labels: off-topic, Oregon, sojurns, YouTube

Can I pronounce "Imnaha"? As these videos prove, no, I sure can't!

Labels: off-topic, Oregon, sojurns, YouTube

In part 3, I argue with Lars Larson (on the radio) while cruising to Hells Canyon in the middle of a thunder storm. Along the way, I encounter a family of deer, break them up and then attempt to reconcile the situation.

Labels: off-topic, Oregon, sojurns, YouTube

I don't think this video needs any further context. The picture quality isn't the best but I think the audio makes this one worth posting.

Labels: off-topic, sojurns, videos, YouTube

Did you know that there's actually stuff in Oregon beyond the Cascade Range and east of the Willamette Valley? It's a fact!

I know, I was just as surprised as you are now when I first learned this after 22 years of living in this state. While studying at the University of Oregon, my friend "Dangermoose" and I ventured out to the Alvord Desert and the little town of Fields, which sits in the bottom, right-hand corner of the state. At the time, Fields boasted a population of eight people and eleven dogs.

I regret to inform y'all that, despite having lived in Oregon for almost all of my 31 years on this planet, I had never set foot anywhere near Hells Canyon until a few weeks ago. I had a long weekend to kill so I decided it was time to mosey out that way. I tossed a tent in the trunk and aimed my car in the vague direction of the canyon and Joseph, OR.

A bit of a digression here. Have you heard of these places called "Walled Mart"? I think that's what they're called. I stopped at one in Pendleton and...It. Had. Everything. Tacos. Every cereal ever created in history of man. Denim shorts. Mud-flaps. Davenports. Wide aisles too. And super-happy elderly people that greeted me at the front entrance. Yes sir, good ol' Walled Mart where I doubt anything bad ever happens, everyone is always happy and the staff are well-groomed, well-treated and enjoy reasonable hours, high pay and quality benefits.

So this is the first installment of a series of short videos I put together about Wallowa County and "the wilds" of Oregon. Over the course of the trip I encountered dumpster-diving deer, irritated cows, thunderstorms, strange towns, fire service employees and more. In this video, I explore the front entrance to Joseph, a town that likes to brag that it's "heaven on earth" and that it sits at the edge of the "Swiss Alps of Oregon."

In addition to numerous art galleries and a corner filled with Swiss chalet-style shops and an "Arcade of the Dammed" (I'm still angry that I couldn't get "TMNT: Turtles in Time" to work and that the "Addams Family Pinball Machine" locked-up), several shops sell "What Happens in Joseph, Stays in Joseph" bumper stickers. I know, right? But do the residents know? They have to be on this gag.

Also: my father now has one of these sitting in the back window of his Camry and he has yet to notice it. Anyway, on to the video...

Labels: off-topic, sojurns, videos, YouTube

It's right around midnight and I'm standing in the middle of nowhere waiting to climb into the belly of a 40-foot tall art-deco rocket ship. People covered in neon lights are rappelling down the side and I'm hoping I'll get to do the same but there's a long line and it's barely moving. Behind me, someone is cracking jokes with an accent that sounds like it belongs to a Bond villain.

It's a rail-thin woman dressed in a white bikini and a long, fur jacket. Standing next to her is David Carradine. Sure, Carradine supposedly died a few months earlier in a bizarre accident in Bangkok but there he is standing in front of me. Whoever this man is, he's the spitting image of the late actor. This guy even sounds like him. He's wearing a bowler hat and a jacket that matches his date's.

Carradine's doppleganger says his name is Happy and I spend the next twenty minutes locked in one of the more...interesting conversations of my life. At one point, the woman takes it upon herself to coach me in the "art of proper hugging." Apparently, the trick is to squeeze the other person as tightly as you can and she demonstrates this repeatedly. Before I head up into the rocket, she gives me a lighter and Happy hands me a necklace with a shiny, brown stone pendant. I have nothing to offer these people in return but bemused bewilderment.

Encounters like this are par for the course at Burning Man. Anyone who attended the event in the '90s will tell you that the current version is a Disney-fried, overly compromised mockery of its former self. I wish I could have seen the old days when Black Rock City was supposedly "completely unhinged" (a description offered by one long-time Burner I spoke with) but I still feel like I got my money's worth. I was jostled awake at 4 AM one night by a nearby theme camp blasting Daft Punk's "Around the World" so loud it made the earth shake. According to the rumors floating around the next day, those responsible were actually Daft Punk, who had shown up at the festival for an impromptu, late-night concert.

I still haven't bothered to confirm if the electronic duo was really behind it all. I guess I'd rather not know.

I went to Nevada expecting to find something close to Barter Town in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. After all, there's an actual Thunderdome that's built every year where combatants bounce around while whacking each other on the head with giant foam mallets. Instead of spending six days wandering around in a faux-post apocalyptic orgy, I spent that week mesmerized by an annual event so overloaded with good intentions, overall weirdness and contradictions that a 1,000 page tome could never cover the whole thing.

The goal of Burning Man is to bring 40,000+ people together into the middle of a godforsaken playa covered in corrosive alkaline dust to build a temporary utopia for a week and then wipe it all away in order to preserve its natural beauty (and avoid hefty fines from the Bureau of Land Management). While the efforts of the volunteers who clean up the mess afterward are nothing short of extraordinary, it's hard to argue that the festival is green, despite its high ideals and "leave no trace" policy. The amount of fuel and resources required to bring everyone together in the middle of nowhere could power a battleship battalion for a thousand years.

So it's easy to scoff at Burning Man until you actually spend a week out there. Environmental impact aside, the general good vibe is nothing sort of magical, man. I was won over when a woman from the UK flagged me down one morning and invited me to attend a free pancake feed/dance party. There's this sort of thing going on at all hours. Free clubs, free food, free mini-golf, free drive-in movie theaters, free admission to a "death camp" featuring hundreds of suicidal Barbie dolls and free, ummmmm, this thing. Once you shell out the price of admission, money and bartering are verboten and the city operates on a "gifting system" that I never did quite get the hang of.

And on Saturday night everybody gathers around a humongous effigy and watches the thing burst into a gigantic fireball before running circles around it. Last year, someone fell into the flames and later sued the organizers.

It all falls somewhere between the Oregon Country Fair, a never-ending rave, Las Vegas and a modern art show but with explosions, "mutant vehicles," and 12-hour dust storms. On the day the festival's namesake went up in flames, I found myself stuck out in the middle of the playa, far from my camp and getting pounded by dust and wind. I could see, maybe, eight feet in front of me. Somewhere in the haze I spotted a giant shadow and made my way towards it. It turned out to be a Victorian house on wheels. I sought shelter inside and spent part of the afternoon chatting with two German guys and "Professor Birdbath," the pilot of this strange vessel. He was waiting for his colleagues to repair the engine.

The question friends, coworkers and family all asked me when I got back was "is it worth it?" Going to Burning Man involves buying or borrowing all sorts of camping equipment that will forever be tarnished by playa dust and subjecting oneself to a week of nonstop noise, extreme weather, freaks on stilts dressed in bondage gear, rank body odor and the potential for grave bodily harm. The back of every ticket essentially states "you could die. No, seriously." I don't regret going out there for a second but I can't see myself ever doing it again. Ok, maybe, if I could borrow an RV.

I was left with the impression that most of the people who still attend Burning Man go to, well, get smashed and stare at weird shit. Still, there's a spiritual side to the festival that some attendees take Very Seriously. One of the event's reoccurring centerpieces, "The Temple," is a 3-story tall wooden shrine that sits along the central Esplanade. Every year, attendees head out there to write on the walls, leave tributes to their dearly departed and sometimes mourn for hours at a time. The outpouring of emotion the structure endures over the course of the week is incomparable. On the last night of the festival, long after most of the crowd has hit the highway, the temple goes up in flames in a solemn ceremony.

Reports of life-changing experiences and transformative moments are easy to come by online. While my week lacked any sort of huge epiphany, there was one incident that will haunt me for years to come. I'd love to share it with you but this sort of thing is far too embarrassingly earnest to go around posting on the internet.

So instead I'll wrap up this overlong blog post with this anecdote: I set my tent up near a group of Australians who had filled their camp with Christmas decorations from the land down under. One morning while I was jump starting a neighbor's RV, I chatted with one of them about an incident that happened the year prior. They were camped out near the festival's air field when a 21-year old woman wandered over from a plane that had just landed. She was wearing a bathing suit, a cowboy hat and a pair of boots. The only thing she had with her was a small bottle of water for a week in this ragged wasteland.

She had hitched a ride on a plane that had flown in from Reno and they were all aghast that anyone could be so daft as to display such a complete disregard for their own personal safety. After lecturing her, they immediately asked around for supplies. Slowly but surely their neighbors offered her an extra tent, food, clothing and enough to get through to the end of the festival. You can probably guess the punchline to this story.

"We were wrong. Actually, she brought everything she needed with her."

Also: here's a link to a prerequisite Flickr gallery.

Labels: off-topic, religion

Yosemite.

Mono Lake.

Yosemite again.

Take a guess.

Labels: off-topic

A colleague of mine from high school spent the holidays running around southeast Asia and put together a blog about his travels. Among the things I learned from reading it:

Cambodia is a country with no Pepto Bismol, Tums or Alka-Seltzer.

It's best to stay away from the mushroom milkshakes sold at full moon parties

Bangkok may or may not have a better subway system than the one in New York.

Recommended reading? Definitely.

Labels: off-topic

Ok, so Disney World didn't provide a complete refuge from what's going on across the US. It's difficult to find a newspaper for sale anywhere and while internet service runs $11 a day and the nearest accessible WiFi network is at least ten miles away, little bits of reality did creep in.

Or at least a skewed version of reality did. After all, the resort sits smack dab in the middle of one of the most hotly contested swing states in the union. Check out what greeted us in the Hall of Presidents:

A bust of Josh Brolin, er, GW himself. Same difference. He played Kennedy, uh, I mean Bush once.

Yeah, if you don't get that reference you're obviously not a fan of the best adventure movie released between June 15th and June 30th 1985.

Anyway, inside the Hall of Presidents a robotic version of the 42nd president delivered a speech praising freedom and why we need to *snicker* protect the tenets of the Constitution. I struggled to suppress laughter while watching the show, mostly because the gigantic vet sitting three seats away from me was taking all of this Very Seriously. Sitting up straight in his chair, he looked like he was going to burst into a Walter Sobchak-sized display of super patriotism at any given second.

And the Bush Bot stands next to Robo-Nixon. Oh, how I love the Magic Kingdom. Let me count the ways...

We woke up every day to find commercial breaks during morning newscasts filled with nasty attack ads from both the McCain and Obama camps. Many guests in the parks were decked out in political gear. One guy waiting for a bus outside of Hollywood Studios had a homemade "Vote for Barack" shirt. Somewhere in the UK Pavilion at EPCOT I saw a large family all wearing McCain/Palin shirts. A grandmother, a husband and wife, their many kids, even a baby, were all displaying their faith in the GOP.

On the plane ride from Houston to Orlando we were seated next to an older gentleman reading McCain's autobiography. From that point on, we decided it would be best not to talk or even think about politics the entire time. Immediately after making this decision, three women sitting across the aisle got into an argument with a male flight attendant after he made the mistake of calling one of them "honey." This ended with him being reassigned to business class and them spending half the flight loudly telling anyone who would listen about how "they were soooo going to write a letter to the airline." The guy next to us buried his head in his book and he looked like he wanted to hide in the bathroom when an attendant asked him to fill out a form relating his recollection of what happened.

Instead, he folded it up, put in the back of his book and kept on reading. Which, honestly, is what I would have probably done myself.

Also: at EPCOT there's an attraction called "The Universe of Energy" or, under its revised title, "Ellen's Energy Adventure." The current version features Ellen DeGeneres as the host and, somewhere in there, she explains the virtues of offshore drilling.

If I can be frank here, it's the most batshit insane theme park ride I've ever seen. It's 45-minutes long, it involves a Jeopardy dream sequence co-starring Alex Trebek, Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Nye the Science Guy. If that wasn't enough, in the middle of the attraction, what seems like a bland movie screening suddenly turns into a ride. The seats break into mobile sections, the screen disappears and the audience is led through a primordial scene involving a robot Ellen's battle-to-the-death with a giant eel.

I swear I'm not making this up. You can read more about the whole thing here.

Labels: off-topic, politics

OK, neither of us got all that drunk in Disney World but I had to come up with some kind of a riff on that Cory Doctrow book. Time for a slide show...

Say what you will about the Disney parks. That if you've seen one, you've seen 'em all. That they're overpriced and filled with the worst examples of American humanity imaginable. That they, perhaps even more so than the Circus Circus casino circa 1972 best exemplify the death of the American Dream or whatever Hunter S. Thompson was babbling about in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Despite all of that, the people running these places know their way around explosives. This photo was taken from a restaurant at the Japanese Pavilion during EPCOT's nightly fireworks extravaganza. The show beings with a four-story tall fireball in the middle of the park's lagoon. Why? I have no idea and I don't think the pyromaniacs running the show do either. It just looks cool and from the window of that restaurant it looked like the end of the world at the Itsukushima Shrine.

This is also pretty creepy. Feel free to mock them but, after few days of 90% humidity and a constant onslaught of singing robots in a paved-over swamp, Dale hats start to make a lot of sense in a Stockholm Syndrome-kind of way. Now why would I or the person I was traveling with subject ourselves to a week of this? Because, somehow, for reasons I can't explain, we consider this sort of thing fun. Or at least a lot more interesting than lounging around on a beach somewhere.

And did I mention the explosions?

Ok, on second thought I cold probably give you a thousand rambling words praising the merits of roller coasters like Expedition Everest or why I consider the Haunted Mansion one of the finest creations of the western world but, instead, here's a photo of an indoor drive-in movie theater/restaurant at Disney's Hollywood Studios. Diners sit at tables that look like old Chevys and some of the waitresses zoom around on roller skates. Brilliant!

This is from a mural in the queue line for the dinosaur ride at Animal Kingdom. Isn't that a subversive bit of something else? I'm sure it's led to at least 1/10th as many awkward conversations between parents and their frightened kids as the death of Bambi's mother. Imagine being four years old and, after this uncomfortable reminder of your parents' mortality, your mother leads you onto a three-minute jeep ride through a fake jungle filled with screaming animatronic lizards that leap out of the dark? The stuff of childhood nightmares? Sure.

One thing that sets the Disney parks aside from the likes of the Six Flags chain is the attention to detail. I've never set foot in a small village in the foothills of the Himalayas but after wandering through the recreation at Animal Kingdom I feel like I may as well have. Small Himalayan villages sell $8.00 kids meals and have people in Safari Mickey costumes wandering the streets, don't they?

If you ever feel up to spending a week at Disney World, for whatever reason, I recommend traveling in October. The heat isn't quite as unbearable as August, the crowds are lighter and off-season airfare and hotel rates are obviously cheaper. EPCOT also hosts an excellent Food and Wine Festival. If not for that, I probably would have gone the rest of my life without ever trying escargot or eating anything from New Zealand. I didn't even know people in New Zealand ate food until last week.

There's also the annual series of "Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Parties." During these events full-grown adults run around grabbing handfuls of candy from barrels in Jack Sparrow outfits. We spotted no less than four families dressed as The Incredibles. Outside the resort, the presidential election was in full force and the Dow Jones was jumping up and down like a rabid bear on a trampoline. I guess that's a good part of the appeal of a place like this. It's incredibly easy to turn your brain off at Disney World, a refuge of overpriced PG-rated fun surrounded by a few thousand acres of untapped swampland. I'd like to think my week-long theme park lobotomy did my blood pressure some good.

Labels: holidays, off-topic

Please enjoy this Flickr gallery of snapshots I took in and around San Francisco and Monterey a few weeks ago. They include photos of things like creepy modern art, Mission District murals, annoying alarm clocks that roll off nightstands, a post-modern pirate-shop/after-school writing center, a dog in a coffee shop, bars of Alcatraz-brand soap, a Golden Gate Bridge-themed GEICO ad, a cigar chomping, talking-cat fortune teller machine and a painting in the bathroom at a Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant (see above).

If you ever find yourself at one I recommend the fish and chips. Also included: photos of that gigantic, garish mansion where, if I remember correctly from the tour, Citizen Kane hung out with Charlie Chaplin and Bob Hope (that's the one up top there).

Labels: off-topic, photos

Someday I'll get back to blogging about things that are related to Portland. Tonight is not that day. I spent part of my vacation in the city where hippies supposedly come from. Oddly enough, I only spotted a single hippie. He had no teeth, was sitting at the corner of Haight and Ashbury near where the Gap once stood and was holding a sign that read "need a dollar for weed." If the homeless always lie about what they're going to spend their hard-earned panhandling dollars on, I don't want to think about where the dollar a German tourist passed along while having his picture taken with him is going to wind up.

Here are a few of the other things and/or stuff I saw:

SFMOMA is currently hosting a contemporary Chinese art exhibit. Among the highlights: a large statue of a sleeping Mao surrounded by hundreds of plastic dinosaurs, an anatomically-correct mannequin having her hair yanked off by an angry frog and these gleefully smiling guys that will forever haunt my field of vision every time I close my eyes for the next several months. Probably more creepy: a video-art display in a dark room featuring featureless figures killing themselves over and over again. The room was filled with families and people of all ages. I really, really wish I could have taken a photo of their expressions.

Here's a photo taken at the Palace of Fine Arts/Exploratorium. I rented a bike from a shop to get from Fisherman's Wharf to the Presidio and across the bay. I never did find the Yoda fountain at Industrial Light and Magic but I did have the honor of getting yelled at by several bike-speed junkies for going too slow across the Golden Gate Bridge. The New Pornographers and Gnarls Barkley played an outdoor show near there that Saturday but I was off being a tourist elsewhere.

The last time I was in San Francisco's Chinatown I was shocked to find seahorses for sale, presumably because people actually eat them. This time it was adorable live pheasants in small wooden crates. Two for seven bucks. I was traveling with my parents and my mother and I had a PETA moment where we briefly considered buying them and setting them free. Then I realized what I'd eaten for lunch an hour earlier because I thought it sounded neat: pheasant flambe at a nearby restaurant. The "omnivore's dilemma," it makes hypocrites of us all. Or at least me.

Ah, here's something related to this blog's m.o. I never did figure out why this bar in North Beach has "Portland, Oregon" written over the doorway. Given the parent situation and the leg injury, I wasn't able to explore the bar scene beyond the crazy/weird/cool Tonga Room. With its lagoon, a floating island bandstand and a dance floor made out of an old schooner, I'm convinced it's the world's most elaborate tiki bar.

Likely the most interesting drinking establishment I didn't drink in: Slide, a spot with a secret slide entrance from its days as a Prohibition-era speak easy. I also missed out on the Black Horse Pub, which comes highly recommended by the most knowledgeable-of-all-things-related-to-bars English expat math professor I know, coincidentally the only....

One of the many murals in the Mission District. I purchased running socks from a nearby market. They were made in Pakistan and did not fit me but they cost three bucks. Only three bucks!

Here's a photo from one of the many hipster enclaves quickly gentrifying the Mission District: the pirate store at 826 Valenica, the first of Dave Eggers' growing empire of after-school creative writing centers for kids and/or cheeky gift shops. At the very least, the place is a lot more interesting and honorable than what's going down in several neighborhoods in east Portland right now (what am I saying? I thought this place was awesome). The pirate meme was tired years ago but I give the creators of the shop credit for all the displays, products and quirks that are too numerous to all be mentioned here. My favorites: the various planks for sale and a sign extolling the many uses of lard.

One afternoon I climbed out of a BART station and found a group of anti-Scientology protesters, all wearing those V for Vendetta masks. I'm sure the "Anonymous" protests have become commonplace in just about every major city in the country but I think it was still somehow disconcerting enough to warrant a photo. Plus, those masks? Creepy!

Labels: off-topic

I recently killed part of an afternoon in Seattle's Capitol Hill district and the Pike/Pine Corridor. Supposedly the "heart of trendy Seattle," they've been dubbed everything from Seattle's equivalent of San Francisco's Castro district to the birthplace of grunge. Supposedly, Pearl Jam came up with their band name in a Capitol Hill coffeehouse and several bands from that era got their start in nearby clubs.

On Wednesday the only signs I could find of the district's grunge past were a few record stores, a head shop and a middle-aged homeless man busy screaming out the lyrics to a song from Vs. outside of a QFC. I can't say I was surprised. When I visited the Haight a few years ago I found a burnt-out junkie standing next to a Ben and Jerry's across the street from a Gap at the district's famous intersection. Apt metaphors for the dark sides of two generations worth of hopeless dreamers?

Sure.

Capitol Hill and Pike/Pine seem like they're experiencing the first pangs of gentrification. Or maybe it's more like the fifth or sixth-thousandth pangs. Apartment buildings are turning into condos and I spotted a few people trotting down the street pushing baby carriages. You can practically watch real estate prices climb like time-lapse film footage of weeds growing but there's still a few rundown, graffiti-covered buildings to be found. The impression that I was left with is that the entire area is on the verge of going full-blown Pearl District at any given second.

One sign that the neighborhood is mutating into a yuppie stronghold is Bimbo's Cantina, formerly Bimbo's Bitchin' Burrito Kitchen. The internet tells me that this place was once a hole-in-the-wall hipster hangout with a staff known for being rude and, well, downright bitchy to customers. Its new location, sans the lucha libre stain-gassed windows and south-of-the-border brick-a-brak, could easily pass for a martini bar.

Nonetheless, my rather polite waiter was wearing a flannel shirt straight out of an early Soundgarden press photo and my Homestyle Burrito put the similar "Elmer Fudd" burrito at the Belmont Laughing Planet to shame. Weighing in at what had to be a full pound or more, this monstrosity combined the best parts of a traditional burrito with a Thanksgiving dinner. I left the place feeling like a boa constrictor that had just consumed a Disneyland employee in a Mickey Mouse costume.

I wish I could have seen the neighborhood in the early-90s but I guess I'll just have to settle for the condos, the fantastic burritos and Stumptown Coffee's first non-Portland location.

Some other stuff:

A Jimi Hendrix statue outside the Capitol Hill Everyday Music.

An old movie poster on the side of a warehouse.

Uh, yeah.

"News" being a bunch of show posters and Green Peace ads stabled to the side of a former telephone pole.

Labels: off-topic, Seattle

Here's two herky-jerky clips I captured with my camera on Wednesday night:

Labels: music, off-topic, Seattle

No one else I know was foolhardy to go with me to watch Radiohead in the rain last night. There's plenty of horror stories out there about the White River Ampitheatere. About how it's located in one of the worst spots imaginable for an outdoor venue. About the nightmarish gridlocks that back up traffic all the way from the I-5 on-ramp onto Highway 18. About how what should be a 45 minute drive to or from Seattle can turn into a tedious hell ride.

Despite all that, I decided to head south 30 minutes before the opening act on the heels of an afternoon spent running around the Emerald City. I assumed that I could avoid five o'clock traffic and any traffic snarls leading to the ampitheatere by arriving just before Radiohead was set to go on stage. Well, that didn't happen.

Once I was off the interstate I found myself in an ocean of frustrated Seattle hipsters all trying to get to the same place I was heading. At one point, it took 20-minutes to go half a mile. If I hadn't been traveling alone, I would have jumped out to smoke a cigarette in the middle of the highway like so many other people did to kill time.

Total travel time from downtown Seattle: Two. And. A. Half. Hours. The White River Ampitheatere can found down a skinny two-lane highway in the middle of the Muckleshoot Indian Reservation. Several poorly-timed stoplights along the way bog traffic down even further.

I arrived about 20 minutes into the band's set as they were playing "2 _ 2 = 5" and found a spot in the nosebleed edge of the ampitheater's lawn. Radiohead's light show, which consists of video screens and skinny florescent picture tube doodads truly is amazing. While they mostly stuck to their post-Kid A space rock stuff the atmosphere, the light show and Thom Yorke's spastic bobblehead dancing made it all worth while.

It rained on and off again the entire time and, in maybe a weird way, maybe that's the ideal conditions for a Radiohead show. Or maybe the ampitheater's amazing ability to retain what the crowd was smoking numbed me to the cold and mud.
Yeah, that's what I meant when I typed "atmosphere."

It took 90 minutes to get back to the interstate. Memo to Radiohead's management: there's two gigantic stadiums in the middle of downtown Seattle that can handle a crowd of 20,000+ much better the middle of flippin' nowhere. If they ever make it back to the Northwest you might want to look into them.

Here's a link to the Seattle PI's review of last night's show.

Labels: music, off-topic, Seattle

Through a series of events I became the owner of three trial "candidate flavor" cans of Mountain Dew. There's a website where drinkers can vote for their favorite. The winner will go on to become a full-fledged Mountain Dew offshoot.

The cans were sent to me under the condition that I write about them on the blog. Because I'm not one to risk enduring the ire of PepsiCo and because I'm consumer whore at heart, here's a careful, mature and scientific analysis of each flavor conducted in the most professional, scientific and controlled setting possible. By "most professional, scientific and controlled setting possible" I mean in the middle of my living room during an otherwise boring Saturday afternoon with Navy Seals playing in the background.

Bill, a friend of mine living and working in DC, also got suckered into this and we decided to collaborate on a taste test via Instant Messenger. Obviously, we took all of this -->Very Seriously<---. After all, soda taste testing is SUPER IMPORTANT BUSINESS. We immediately determined that no professional evaluation of new soda flavors would be proper without working booze into the mix. He grabbed a bottle of bourbon on his end and I went in search of what I had lying around: a bottle of mescal a friend brought back from Mexico last winter and a bottle of Captain Morgan's "Tattoo" Spiced Rum.

The Mountain Dew test flavors included "High Voltage," "Revolution" and "Supernova." We decided to test them in the order of how likely they'd be to kill us, based on the names alone. No one could live through an encounter with a supernova and revolutions have killed a lot more people than electricity. So we went with "High Voltage" first.

No good came of this. Here's my report of our findings:

Test flavor # 1: Mountain Dew High Voltage

Color: light blue, not unlike Windex

Bouquet: Like a Pixie Stick with a twinge of Windex left forgotten in an abandoned green house for two decades.

Taste: Weak. Was this the best that the flavor scientists working in a bunker a thousand stories below PepsiCo's corporate headquarters could throw at us? This flavor my tongue feel like it was being punched by apathetic kittens. After two more sips I wasn't feeling very "xtreme," which I'm pretty sure is how Mountain Dew is supposed to make me feel. Neither Bill or I were in the mood to BMX bike down the side of a dam or jump out of an airplane with a lion (the lion being the only one with a parachute). On a 1 to 10 scale, Bill gave this flavor a 4. I went with a 2. How could something with this much caffeine make me so damn sleepy?

Taste with mescal: Like fermented baby powder. Not that I've ever had the pleasure.

Taste with spiced rum: Very, very bad. Like burning.

Taste with bourbon: "Tolerable," according to Bill.

Test flavor # 2: Mountain Dew Revolution

Color: Similar to that of Windex. Yes, just like the last one.

Bouquet: Like the smell of sweat dripping off the brows of thousands of angry revolutionaries, the hearts pounding to the same beat of a bloody coup d'état. Er, wait, scratch that. It smelled more like a package of Sweet Tarts left out in the rain.

Taste: If revolutions were soda flavors Mountain Dew's Revolution would taste more like the Bay of Pigs than the American Revolution. While maybe not quite as unsuccessful as the Bay of Pigs, it certainly wasn't on the level of the Bolsheviks. I decided it was the soda equivalent of that student revolt in Les Miserables. While not at all successful, at least Mountain Dew's Revolution has some heart. And if Andrew Lloyd Webber gets bored and eccentric in his later years he may just write a musical about it. Do you hear the people sing? Singing the songs of angry, caffeine addicted sugar addicts? Bill compared the flavor to the sexual revolution but later decided it was only worthy of the acoustic version of the Beatles' "Revolution." I gave it a 6, Bill went with a 5. After further discussion, we determined that America's founding fathers and their wooden teeth couldn't have handled the soft drinks of the 21st century.

Taste with mescal: Much like I would imagine the ectoplasm of Karl Marx's ghost. Now I know what Bill Murray's character in Ghostbusters felt like after getting attacked by Slimer. Then again, he probably didn't swallow any of the green ghost's goop.


Taste with spiced rum: Actually, not bad. I think Che Guevara's zombie would like it.

Taste with bourbon: So says Bill "viva la Mountain Dew Revolution (with bourbon)."

Test flavor # 3: Mountain Dew Supernova

Color: Like super-cheap convenience store wine.

Taste: Like super-cheap convenience store wine after being filtered through a Slurpee machine. Bill: "I must say, I don't care for... that thing it does. Which I'm not sure what that is." Me: "COUGH! COUGH! GAG! PUKE!" At the very least, it lived up to its name. Somewhere, as I'm typing these words, a bartender is mixing this flavor with Brut to make a "Champagne Supernova" in the hopes of making a mint of off people who don't throw up in their mouths a little bit at the mere thought of Oasis so they can...throw up in their mouths a little bit. Bill gave this one a 2. I gave it a 4, for at least doing what Mountain Dew should: make its drinkers feel like they've just popped a fighter pilot "go pill."

€Taste with mescal: Let's just say I felt the need to apologize to my sink before dumping combo mescal/Supernova down it. If a gigantic "xtreme" slug/sewer overflow monster pops out of the Willamette riding a skateboard in the near future I just might the person to blame for its creation.

Taste with spiced rum: Like expired napalm.

Taste with bourbon: "Just weird and bad."

For a final test, we tossed all three flavors together and mixed them with our respective liquors. Mine concoction caused me to lose the senses of touch and smell for about 10 minutes. Bill's response: "I CAN'T SEE!"

There you have it, PepsiCo. Make what you will of our incredibly serious and totally scientific conclusions.

Labels: off-topic, soda