Home of the Classy Boozehound

It's sad that after all these years, you can hardly see the mural of Stars of Yesteryear at the Sandy Hut anymore. It's too dark in there, a Golden Tee machine covers most of the last panel, and while I approve of the archival thinking that caused them to put a sheet of plexiglas over the
damn thing, it's kinda too little too late, and now the reflection it causes makes it almost impossible to take a picture of it.

When I first encountered the Sandy Hut, it was dark in there like it is now. It was entirely the purview of old men and hookers. As the years went by, more and more people realized that you could get a brain-damagingly strong drink there for pennies, and they were none too diligent in their carding. So lots of young 'uns like me started patronizing the joint. The lights came up a lot higher, almost to industrial cafeteria strength.
This revealed exactly how nasty the place was. A fine sheen of brown gravy covered everything: years of neglect and airborne nicotine had made it so. At some point, a dancefloor that could house perhaps two and a half dancing patrons had been installed and forgotten. There was a shuffleboard table.

But of most interest to me was the mural. The way Sinatra is depicted says that it dates back to the early '50's, and the only sort of signature was the enigmatic tag line, "Color by Vera". Its conceit was that of The Bar in Showbiz Heaven, where all the great ones got sauced.
And I used to annoy my friends by asking them how many of these highly recognizable faces they could put names to.


The first panel actually starts out with an indistinct bit of anonymous customer and a waiter with his back to you, signalling an order. Then comes Danny Kaye, Adolphe Menjou ("The Best Dressed Man In Hollywood". His grandson lives in Portland, and we worked together for a while), Harold Lloyd, Bette Davis, Dame Edith Sitwell, Arturo Toscanini, Frank Sinatra sitting with Marilyn Monroe, someone that is either Clark Gable or John Barrymore, Edward G. Robinson and Marcel Marceau as 'Pip'.

The middle panel is given over to comedic stars o' yesteryear. W.C. Fields has an enormous bottle, while Buster Keaton has a tiny, tiny shot glass.

Charlie Chaplin has his back to you. Groucho and Harpo Marx are there, but no Chico. (Much less any Gummo or Zeppo.)

Laurel and Hardy are present, but does that rightfully cancel out any sort of Abbott and Costello presence? "Who's On First?" (like it or not) pretty much provided the template for most modern American comedy.

Exactly why Harold Lloyd isn't in this panel is anybody's guess. Or for that matter, George Burns, Fred Allen, Jack Benny...

(Or Bob Hope! Or Bing Crosby! Anyway...)





The final panel has Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong crossing clarinet and cornet over the action below, which happens to be an unlikely table at which Jimmy Durante and George Bernard Shaw might mingle, with Peter Lorre looking ominously on. Eleanor Roosevelt and Albert Einstein are also present, but so is Veronica Lake. Someone that is either supposed to be Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo is ignoring all of them.

Behind that stupid video golf machine is Pablo Picasso (that one stumped me for years, and then someone pointed out that both of his eyes were on one side of his face) and Kate Smith. It's easy to forget how much of a star she was, once upon a time.


I had the idea over the years that maybe someone should do the same thing on the wall opposite, but with stars of today. But who would that be? A bunch of people who you wish you saw less of anyway? People whose work you might appreciate, but frankly aren't especially distinctive looking?

Especially when in charicature, Tyra Banks would look like Beyonce who would strongly resemble Vivica A. Fox. You would recognize Obama, or Schwarzenegger, but do you want to look at them while drunk? I like Catherine Keener and Phillip Seymour Hoffman (for instance), but would they make any sense as cartoons?

And besides, to be really true to the idea, you would need to include statesmen and philosophers. Famous artists. (And, I suppose, any famous mimes you could think of.)

Funny too that the Sandy Hut ("Home of the Fat Man Sandwich," it said for decades on its sign, while having discarded it from the menu long ago) was probably never a classy joint, but the conventions of the day caused it to somehow need to present at least the cultural signifiers of classiness, because drinking alcohol is always to be presented as fun.

In short, it didn't promise you an evening with Garbo, just the idea that any evening spent drinking was going to be a romantic adventure. Even on a flatiron block at NE 15th and Sandy Blvd. in Portland, Or.

Uh...

Well, the snow has melted now, and it smells terrible. For about two weeks, we all tried to tell ourselves that the dog shit and cigarette butts that lingered under the snow might somehow magically go away, and this is -demonstrably- not true. The deck could use a good sweepin', and I'm sort of embarrassed at the amount of kitty litter I dumped in the street.
But we did what we had to do -it was prison, right?- and later on when the questions get asked, I'll be able to lie with a clear conscience.

And about those cigarette butts, what's the deal with that? I all but quit during that week that Bee was in Hawaii, and without the requisite insanity, too. I didn't need vitamin supplements or anything, I just didn't smoke.
But then I worked, and that always does it. Next thing you know, I buy myself a pack of Camel studs. I couldn't buy my beloved Nat Sherman's Havana Ovals because that'd be it: I'd be back smoking full-time. So I did that thing that we do, to wit: to ameliorate my shame and gnawing sense of dread about doing something that I know I shouldn't, I do it in a way that is marginally less pleasurable, therefore enabling me to feel good-er about it.
As was put to me in conversation the other day; in what other area of our lives do we ever do that?

It sort of makes me want to make a brief historic overview of my addictions:

Tobacco, in cigarette form (circa age twelve to present): What can I tell ya', kid? (Delivered in gravelly, guttural death-voice) They taste s'damn good. As Oregon rolls into its last day in which one may smoke in a bar, I have to ask one more time; so why can't filthy old man dive bars still smoke, and alla resta them don't have to? If you're wondering how the Gummint might go about seperating the smoke-free wheat from the bad-behavioring chaff, well, they wouldn't. The bar itself would. Every bar that has opened in Portland in the last five years (except The Standard, actually) has been non-smoking by choice, and I have no reason to believe that trend wouldn't just continue.
The argument that "this measure will save lives!" is no doubt true, but far less so than a measure banning...Oh any number of things in Portland's air that we all breathe every day, and not because we chose to do so. Like keeping potty-mouth out of your karaoke routine, I believe this measure will do immeasurable good to the innocent children who are always hangin' out in bars.

This is the kind of shit that made me so despise Diane Linn. That being said, I'm going to try, once again, to quit smoking. They fucking kill you, I'm told.

Marijuana (sometime in my sophomore year in high-school to, I dunno, four or five years ago): I, like everyone who ever does it, thought that I'd really stumbled onto something here. A whole new world, fresh for the exploring, that no one had ever seen before lay before me, and I dove right in. I'd get all baked, write chapter upon chapter of relatively good stuff.
I don't -unlike a lot of you- look back at what I wrote in those days and only see crap. That's the stereotype, but I ain't stereah-typical. It was the product of someone who had recently discovered something that worked for him, and had decided to embrace it fully.

For that matter, it worked because it contributed to my twin needs of wanting to view the world from as many perspectives as possible and conducting a life-long study of exactly how far one can go toward clinical insanity without losing complete control of your life.
It's not physically addicting, but it certainly is emotionally addicting. Also, it costs more per ounce than gold. But that's not really why I went from being an all-day-every-day smoker to the once-every-six-months-maybe smoker that I am now. The reason was boredom. I got tired of it after living for several years with a lady who dealt the stuff. So there y'go.

I've done tons of hallucinogens, but they are neither physically nor emotionally addicting, so therefore don't belong on this list.

Alcohol (I'm Not Sure How Old I Was to Present): "...it's a son of a bitch, y'all," to quote the Butthole Surfers. Yep, that kind of sums it up. It's something we like, and something we do, but it's also something we complain about and wax all martyr-y about, too. It's how we deal with disappointment and grief, also how we celebrate the happy things. When we're stressed, when we're relaxed, boozing is just alright with us. Therefore, it has associations with pretty much every aspect of human emotion.
So many of us in the iconoclasm business started out with the clear intention of not living long enough to get Old. As the years go by (and those stupid enough to not outgrow this adolescent notion fall off, and away), we start to note that there's all sorts of ways to view life, and plenty of different ways to be content within it. The fact that you can deal relatively competently with most situations while fucked up isn't without merit, but on the other hand, it's also kind of a badge of honor to grow older minus a cancerous stomach, necrotic liver.

I'm of many opinions on this subject. Like the smoking of tobacco, I think that it's important that you have a place in your life for going and doing things that are relatively wrong, but only to yourself. "To do the kind of magic I do, I have to walk the poison path," I said to wayyy too many people once upon a time. I would put it differently now, but there's still some validity to the main point -you need to do some bad things, too. It rounds you out.
What did Tom Waits say? "Never saw the mornin' /'til I stayed up all night..." And I've always been one to stay up while the resta youze sleep. But- I am also relearning the joys of a good night's sleep, too.

Cocaine (briefly, several years ago): After a life spent angrily ridiculing those who do The Handsome Powder (thanks to Reverend O'Hare), and shaking my head piously at its return to popularity among the young and hip, I found myself actually getting into it briefly, several years ago.
There was this not-exactly-friend who was dealing the stuff when not DJ-ing (why is this so often the case? Because both deejays and cokeheads love the conversation that starts and let me tell you Another fascinating story about how clever and charming I am!- credit again to Rev. O'Hare), who occasionally needed a ride and had no car. So I'd give him a ride, and he'd pay me in coke. After a while, I was paying money for it, too.

Before long, it was all-night sessions of what generally were political discussions with anyone I could get to hang out with me. Not exactly a bad thing, but of course, as the sun was coming up, one can't help but notice the swollen sinuses, the chemical-filled stomach. Occasional bloody noses, y'know.
It bankrupted me, and actually was the last gasp of truly being a rich bachelor. It led to my abrupt departure from my last home, and was just stupid. No complaints about the frenetic conversations, though: my friends are my friends because I find them interesting and smart, so we didn't just sit there and babble about nothing. Still...You can do that without coke too, it turns out.

Never got into opiates, except for opium itself, but that disappeared from my life at the same time Dead tour did (so 1995, I guess). I know it has potential to fuck up your life, but the worst thing that smoking that stuff ever did for me was put me immediately to sleep, where I'd have sweet dreams. I never awoke immediately needing more, which is a hell of a lot better than I can say for nicotine.

** ** **

The ritual we have around here of naming the New Year is a product of the Mondegreen-esque game we play around here of turning misheard-phrases into proper names. Until a few days ago, I really thought that 2009 was going to be named 'Stom Tubbler', but now I think it will be 'Specialty Foxx', which is about as perfect a name for a blaxploitation porn star/secret agent as I've heard.

Another One From The Vaults

(This is another piece from The Antagonist, my old 'zine. Yes folks, in the world shortly before the 'blog, there were several of us weirdoes out there in the world who spent a lot of our time at Kinko's, obsessively cutting-and-pasting for the benefit of almost no readership, and...Well...
(So, there was this bunch of pictures of Jackie O set up near the food court of a mall in downtown Portland. It was being promoted as an art exhibit, and I decided to review it as if it actually were.)

(First, I include a quotation:)
"For what has any consumer ever wanted but to purchase time's defeat and raise yesterday's dead?" -Richard Powers

"Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: The Making of a First Lady"- photos by Jacques Lowe, main floor atrium, Pioneer Place, through September 24, 1998

This isn't art photography. It sort of seems like an exhibit, but is actually about, or a celebration of...A fashion goddess? That's why it was in Pioneer Place, and not a gallery.
About the pictures themselves: pretty good work. They range from carefully staged, posed shots to large shots of crowds (where everyone is at least somewhat candid), to slice-of-life type shots. You shall know which each one is by their title cards.

The title cards are the real story, and they are what I'm actually reviewing. They're nice pictures, but the text is what's really remarkable.
I mean, this isn't here for Art, but has some of art's pretensions (Lowe is referred to as being "recognized as internationally as one of the most renowned photographers of our time" -which strikes me as both redundant and untrue).

It also is not about history, really, so I guess it's all about Jackie, and what made her a fashion goddess. Why? Because she was the first First Lady in modern memory that didn't look like Mom, that's why.
Then again, Jack was the first president in modern memory that didn't look like Grampa. He had an awful lot of Fuck You in his attitude. One of the photos shows he and Jackie at the opera, or some society function that requires balconies anyway, and the title card quotes Jack as saying, "I think this is an ideal way to spend an evening; you looking up at us and we looking down at you."
A lady near me noted this lack of humility out loud, and I noted to myself: yeah, he said that a couple of times. Most famously, there was the time whe somebody called him on the fact that he was rich as hell, and had pretty much had his whole life handed to him. He responded, "Life is not fair."

Heh heh, nooo it's not...There are pictures of early campaign rallies where maybe three or four people show up. Yeah- let history never forget- at first it was like that, until they made a deal with the southern Demos and started spreading the wealth around. They literally had people in West Virginia walking around handing out ten dollar bills.
(In retrospect, there was a lot more to it than that, and the West Virginia story might be entirely bullshit. Just sayin'.)

We see the happy couple at another campaign stop in Coos Bay, Or. The title card notes, "Chatting with a longshoreman; was there anyone she could not charm?" Well, God knows longshoremen usually ignore beautiful women.

It's just too easy to Monday Morning Quarterback history. But- of course Nikita Krushchev is going to smile when he's being photographed talking to the First Lady of the United States. It's what They, The Mighty do, if I'm not mistaken: I've seen all these pictures of 'em.
So the card says, "Krushchev adored Jackie instantly." Well yes, I can see the big smile, and he would have been smiling even still had she looked like a fire hydrant. He had no idea that he'd be proving some faux-historian's point for him, 30-some odd down the road.

Another 'well-that's-hard-to-say' moment for me came later with a picture of the inauguration. The tile card refers to it as "the most memorable inauguration speech in history." I don't remember any of the details from any of the other ones for that matter, and I think that's no accident.
( Of course, thinking about it now, I can recall plenty of other inauguration speeches, and would posit that the above lazy didactic has more to do with that particular speech being watched by so many on television.)
If you ask me, he said all the brave-sounding things new presidents say when they've just stepped off the train from Mere Politiciansville. It's just that he died young, you see.

A good half of the title cards contain some permutation of the phrase, 'this was the last time they would ever...': last time the whole family would be in one room without one of them being in a coffin, last time Jack and Jackie leave their little flat in Georgetown, and my fave; Jackie in a great dress, and it says, "From this day forward, she would be imitated in everything she did." Yup. Suddenly everybody had that stupid accent.
(Oddly, even the popular stage show about the Kennedys - The First Family starring Vaughn Meader- which was a pretty gentle piece of satire, couldn't help making fun of it a little.)

I just can't take it. Here is a picture from the inauguration again. The title card, in some desperate attempt to make Jackie other-than-human, says, "Somehow Jackie, wearing a white pillow-box (sic) hat and white coat" (manages to stand out in an enormous crowd of men wearing black).

This sort of twaddle continues: "The quintessential Jackie: Regal. Serene. Astonishingly beautiful. Exuding inner strength and a certainty of purpose." And a tremendous need to marry Up. To find someone rich enough to sustain her in the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed, as her own family fortune was no longer as strong as could be...
(Even for the writing style of Me, Ten Years Ago, this seems unnecessarily harsh. It would have been funnier too if I'd maybe gone on with the ridiculous hyperbole of the sentence I'm parodying and said, for instance, "With the strength of ten cows. Able to melt lampposts with her gaze." Oh well.)

So she became a political asset to a young, rich person on the rise, and they had children. Jackie is quoted as saying that if one bungles the raising of kids, one has bungled the biggest job in the world. "She didn't bungle," the title card reassures us.

So, no disrespect to Jackie really. On one hand because everybody knows that Dead People Are A-ngels and also because none of this shit is her fault. It's yet another dash of lazy history, mixed with so-called Populist Art, and finally it's just another way to sell clothes.
(As evidenced by the Jackie-inspired Chanel showcase nearby.)

A young lady next to me, truly in awe, said, "She was so beautiful. So, so beautiful...Like Natalie Wood or something. Really beautiful."
I didn't know what to say except, "Yer supposed to say she looked like Audrey Hepburn."

(Natalie Wood is the better comparison though, I now think.)

Bachelors

If you go over to flickr.com and search the word 'bachelor', you will quickly discover the work of one Max Sparber.
Along with the usual pictures of friends and so on, he also has a set of bizarre album covers from years past (recommended), and something entitled "The Lost World of the Swinging Bachelor".

It's a bunch of stills from '60's movies, and they're all just fantastic. That to the left there is one Quinn Redeker, who co-wrote 'The Deer Hunter', and played "Alex Marshall" for several years on 'Days of Our Lives'. Last year, he has some sort of role in 'A Grandpa for Christmas'.
Here, however, he is in a movie called 'Spider Baby' (1968). IMDB also lists 'Attack of the Liver Eaters' , 'Cannibal Orgy, or the Maddest Story Ever Told' and 'The Liver Eaters' as possible substitute titles.

This is a still from 'Help Wanted Female' (1968). This would be the inevitable scene in which the swingin' fella takes his first acid trip, and breaks into an impromptu dance.
Funny thing is, an oft-repeated theme is at work here: all is well and swinging until one of your characters reveals themselves to be a crazed murderer. And one of them always does.

That's the thing: you can't just be a suave sybarite in American Pop Cultch. We gotta punish you for your enjoyment.
"Oh sure, Mister Pipe and Smoking Jacket! You're fine now, but what about when you're attacked by the Liver Eaters? Or beaten up by a leggy blonde call-girl type dame?"

This is from 1968's 'Love After Death', which is an Argentinian masterpiece: most of these movies seem to have come from Beyond The Sea, and all of them tend to be-as I've mentioned before, unclear on whether they're a good-natured romp, or stinging indictment of our modern society, rife as it is with unlikely plots to bury our husbands alive and then go-go dance with other men.

A commenter on IMDB puts it this way: "a man is buried alive by his adulterous wife, he rises from the tomb for a few minutes of Night of the Living Dead-style graveyard stalking, and then decides nothing would be finer than to peep at women in various stages of undress. Heck, so what if he's a corpse!"

Max observes, "Note our bachelor doctor's winning combination of hairpiece, short-sleeve shirt, and cravat. "


This scene from 'I Eat Your Skin' (1964) features one of those things that has largely disappeared from American cinema: the bachelor that is so swingin', he has to beat the broads off with a stick. This would briefly enjoy some vogue in blaxploitation movies as well, though the bachelor in question would be a black stud soul brother.

The movie seems to have entered posterity under the title 'Zombies'. A commenter on IMDB says, "Like draftees into the government-sanctioned moral hygiene videos of the '50s & '60s, the C-actors seem quite willing to mutter the screenplay's bizarre malapropisms: Rich guy welcoming guests to dinner at his uncharted island plantation: "If you want those cocktails I'm afraid your'll have to bring them with you. Juarita (?) is an excellent cook. One thing she will not tolerate is food getting cold. Perhaps it's just as well--I have a Borjelais (sic) I'm very proud of. Hard liquor will just dull the palate." The Spanish is even more improvised--as if translated by Google."

So yeah, brother: you're hep and all, and the skirts can't get enough of ya', but you'll still have to battle those zombies at some point. And by 'zombies', I mean commies, negroes, crazy women and the dread LSD.

'Dr. Sex', it turns out, seems to have been where the 1987 movie 'Mannequin' got its thunder. Let's hear what Max has to say about this:
"The bachelor, who dresses mannequins in store windows, is suffering from the delusion that these mannequins come to life and talk with him while he undresses them. The therapist, as part of his treatment, is here mimmicking a mannequin."

A commenter on IMDB offers:
"Three stories are told by a group of psychologists (one doing a bad Bela Lugosi impression) about their wildest cases, as told to them by their patients.
It's funny, I guess - but ultimately a little boring; as films in the past twenty years have made us expect more, and more quickly."

Max, again:
"This vacationer in Japan, from 1966's Mondo Bizzaro, has requested a special massage, provided for him by a topless Japanese girl. To his frustration, and despite the expectations of the typical Sixties bachelor, instead of providing him with exotic love acts, she breaks eggs on his chest and massages him with them. "

Ultimately, this world don't make no damn sense, even if you're a man of the world. You think maybe you're going to get some good Chinee, and instead (BOINGGG!) Ee-eeggs? On my che-eest?

Oh, those practices of the Exotics. Well, whatever larger point one may feel obligated to make here, I really just wanted to show everybody these damned fantastic pictures. See ya' soon.

The Geographical Names

Well, I did it. Had to get out the bible again this morning.

I had been in Government Camp the other day, and found myself repeating the old story that, despite its name, there had never been a camp established by the government on that part of Mount Hood.
It's true, but the real story is: sometime in the 1840's, an army detachment on its way to Oregon City left a bunch of wagons there. To the people who settled there soon after, this conveyed a kinda official feel to the place.

Indeed, in this sense it resembles Battle Ground, Wash. in that they had anticipated a battle with th' Injuns occurring there, and when it didn't actually happen, the folks there sort of looked around and said, "Well, why don't we build a town?"

So I had to go get out my copy of Oregon Geographic Names, the official tome of the Oregon Geographic Names Board, and general settler of arguments. It has been published on a more or less regular decade-wise basis by the McArthur family since the 1920's. The version I currently own, though I've owned several, is from 1974, when Lewis L. (son of Lewis A.) McArthur had the franchise. As of a year ago, his son passed the family nomenclature biz over to his daughter.
As far as I know, Washington state has no comparable book, which is a shame since that state plays home to Twisp, Usk, Pe Ell, Gobbler's Knob, and Mount Colonel Bob.

I met Lewis L. when I was a kid, and already enthralled by these books. He wasn't exactly young, and told me tales of scooting down Mt. St. Helens on his ass, back when it was a full-size mountain, and the eruption of (whatever the hell that mountain's name was) that gave rise to the myth of Atlantis.
And the reason I was speaking with him at all was due to the fact that my family had been members of the Oregon Geographic Names Board going back at least as far as my grandparents generation. They were a wonderful bunch of (largely speaking) retired academics and state government figures who spent their retirements tearing ass all over the hinterlands, getting drunk and telling stories with their friends.

But also, they debated important points, since no one else would: Should we rename Whorehouse Meadow 'Naughty Girl Meadow'? (They did, but later changed it back.) If we were to rename Squaw Tit Butte, what would we name it? (I don't remember, but there actually was a law passed in Oregon on this subject, in 2001.)
Matter o' fact, this law also considered the few places in Oregon that were named after black people, which were all uniformly prefixed either 'nigger' or 'darky'. (At least Centralia, in Washington, which was started by a black settler named George Washington Bush, just got named for its central-ness.)

Consider:
"Negro Ben Mountain, Jackson County. For many years this 4500 foot peak in the Siskiyou Mountains, a little to the southwest of Ruch and Applegate River, was called Nigger Ben Mountain."
Then he gives the history of the place. But then old Lewis L. starts to editorialize:
"In 1964, when integration was the watchword, the USBGN in Decision List 6402 changed the name to its present form. There is no evidence that the original name was derogatory, and if every name that might now or in the future offend some ethnic group must be altered to suit the changing times, the authorities might just as well resort to a simple numerical designation."

This is about as close to 'fuck you' as an academic gets, I think. It's weird though: I don't recall the book being this lippy. Check this out:
"Deathball Rock, Lane County. This rock is southeast of Blue River. It received its name because of an attempt made by a surveying party cook to bake some biscuits. It appears that he was not entirely successful."

Or:
"Picture Rock Pass, Lake County (...) The name comes from some strange designs or pictures on the rocks about a hundred feet south of the highway. These peculiar marks, made by Indians, are strongly suggestive of a WPA style painting project operated by the aborigines."

Like I say, just plain weird: I've owned at least three editions of this book, and I can say with some certainty that the '80's and '90's editions weren't trying to be funny. It always struck me as a deadly serious business -geographic nomenclature- to these people, and if humor happened, it happened on its own. Consider what Lewis L. had to say about a geographic feature named for his own father:
"Tam McArthur Rim, Deschutes County (...) After McArthur's death in 1951 many people felt that some geographic feature in Oregon should have his name...In retrospect it is interesting to note two curious facts; the Broken Top alpine uplands was one of the few spots in central Oregon that McArthur had not visited, and he probably would have expressed some dissatisfaction at the inclusion of a nickname in otherwise serious nomenclature."

In many places where the place name is prefixed by 'big' or 'crooked', he goes out of his way to note, "the place name is descriptive". This still leaves room for plenty of great stories about actual pioneers contacting 'the original compiler' (i.e. his father) with their various arguments about the origin of certain names, many years old and largely forgotten. If necessary, he'll say things like "the usage 'North Forks River' is wrong", and just leave it at that.

The just-plain-strange is well represented here, as Oregon is a large state, and seems to have always been given to a particularly strong strain of self-mythologizing. You can almost hear the excited drooling that accompanied the writing of the following passage:
"Baby Rock, Lane County. This rock is on the southwest shoulder of Heckletooth Mountain, and above the track of the Southern Pacific Company just southeast of Oakridge. It was named by the Indians. Mrs. Lina A. Flock has given the compiler an unusual legend about the name. Indians who slept near the rock were believed to have been bitten by some animals that left the footprints of a baby. The wounds were fatal.
Finally two Indians determined to exterminate these peculiar animals , and hiding in the rocks above, they surprised the visitors, jumping down on them and covering them with blankets in such a way that they could not escape. The animals were twisted in the blankets and burned up. Indian Charlie Tufti would never go near this rock.
Mrs. Flock's grandfather, Fred Warner, was of the opinion that the peculiar animals were porcupines, which make tracks not unlike a small baby. Indians asserted that the baby tracks remained about the rock for many years, hence the name."

Kinda like "Life In These United States" from Reader's Digest, except on acid, ain't it? I like the friend-of-a-friend style of tale-telling, plus the wide scale dismissal of the humble comma. And 'Heckletooth Mountain'? Named by Mrs. Lina A. Flock's grandmother, of course-"...because of the tall rocks with which it is surrounded near the summit. These resemble the teeth of a heckle, an instrument for handling flax."

The omissions include the odd street and neighborhood names in Portland proper -which I've always held is a serious oversight- and out of the way, unincorporated places like Beggar's Hollow and Ironton. But a lot of what the McArthur family learned over the years has more to do with who had a post office, who was on a rail line...This leads to relatively lengthy posts about places like Box, which was briefly a town, but now is a corner in some guy's pasture.

My daughter might be pleased to note that the origin of the town nearest her home, Helix, "was named because a local resident had a painful experience in the helix of his ear. The testimony is not as conclusive as it might be, but is probably true." He then goes on to tell the somewhat unlikely story there, accompanied by two or so other bullshit-sounding stories.

And this book also brought me the wonder that is Opie Dildock Pass (actually, I think I first heard about it in Spy magazine, back in the '80's, if you can believe that):
"It was named in 1932 by Dee Wright and Ralph Engels, then USFS District Ranger at McKenzie Bridge. They had had difficulty finding a good way down into White Branch canyon but finally found one small, practical passage. They were both reminded of a comic strip character of the early 1900's named Opie Dildock who always found some way out of impossible situations so they decided to honor the pass with his name."

Again; commas, Mr. McArthur! But note here how some very specific spot on some trail I've never even heard of gets serious, loving attention. And there's more:
"The compiler has spent many hours trying to locate a copy of this comic strip to give credit to the cartoonist and verify the spelling. Donald J. Sterling, Jr., of the Oregon Journal and Robert Frazier of the Eugene Register-Guard have also given generously of their time in this quest."
The Journal went out of business and was subsumed into the Oregonian in the early 1980's, (which is why we have two pages of comics, incidentally). Bob Frazier and his wife Rosemary were dear friends of my family, and when he found out he had Alzheimer's, he went into the bathroom and shot himself in the head. There is where the general becomes personal, and where you realize that while we're wandering around living our lives, we are becoming History, whether we like it or not.

But anyway: "The only fact that can be added is that the name is a variant spelling of Knight's Opiedildock, a well known camphor and soap liniment of bygone days. If the reader can add further information, it will be greatly appreciated."

Curiously, it would seem that the book has no online component. Matter of fact, Googling it will net you some pretty interesting things, including this. . The 1974 edition is apparently the one where Lewis L. took over from Lewis A. (the Fourth Edition). I've never read any of the first three, and now see that I need to.
I'd be interested to see what the current generation is doing with this enterprise, being as completely personal yet jokingly serious and scholarly as it is. I imagine that it remains one of the longer tall tales you'll ever encounter, mixed with good, solid research work, and hopefully just as idiosyncratic as any of its forebears, with a solid imprint of the personality that decided it needed discussing.

Fun with Follow-up, or, The Girl With Glasses Smarter than You

(Two posts ago, I mentioned that in my old 'zine from the late '90's, I had forwarded the idea that Anything At All could be reviewed as "art", including things like conversations had loudly in public. Enjoy.)

Meeting of the Editorial staff of whatever the literary/poetry mag at Marylhurst College is called, Late December 1997 @ The Pied Cow

Three loud, pretentious women, one very submissive man-not barely getting a word in edgewise-are seated at the window table in the comfy pillow room of the Cow.
The youngest is this girl with the requisite horn-rimmed glasses. She speaks almost entirely through her nose, as well as sounding like she has a cough drop in the back of her throat. She is enthusing about an upcoming trip to Spain, with the memorable line, "Spain's not nearly as provincial as you might think!"

(Well, yes. Sure it's mostly Catholic and all, but they are a country in Europe, which suggest that they have a culture that goes back a couple thousand years at least. A culture that blends many diverse elements, gracefully. So it's just plain precious that some snooty little try-to-be aesthete from this young-as-hell, basically culture-less country would find it Not Wanting.)

The other ladies (no doubt with encouraging nods from the man's head) were then enthusing about how cool it would be to have a famous (?) editrix corresponding from Spain!

They were comparing themselves to other magazines (loudly! The loudest table in this rather intimate space), like Bikini, for instance. They spoke of how they dislike the "smart-ass, snowboarder" tone of the mag, but that the writing itself was pretty good. Then they spoke of Zzyzva (or however you spell that) lit. mag, and how all their contributors seemed to be on that shock-for-shock-value's-sake vibe. They also were very proud that they (unlike some unnamed mag they clearly felt was their competitor) had put out three issues!

There was a long discussion about the fact that at least one of them was going to have to learn how to write grants. I wish I could remember it. It was interesting.

A long discussion followed about how they weren't going to review books they didn't like. They wanted to avoid the snotty, just cuttin' on every thing attitude of "most reviewers". (Well sure...But at the expense of only printing reviews of things you like? One of the other problems endemic to criticism I've noticed is this nasty tendency to write glowing reviews of one's friend's work, ignoring all else. In many ways, this whole We Musn't Discourage Anyone shit has already gone too far. So this means that no matter how honestly come by a negative opinion of something is, it has no place in that mag? The Tyranny of the Mediocre continues. Besides, I learn more from examining why I don't like something than gushing about why I like it. But that's me.)

Our token Rapist Male raised his head at this point. Struggling to complete a sentence without being interrupted, he started talking about a book he was reviewing. It was written by a woman, -and furthermore- a feminist. He pointed out (accurately, though needlessly) that there were quite a few women out there who would be offended by the mere fact that the reviewer was male.
(My own take on that? Yeah, of course there are. In any realm, there's people who will be offended by anything anyone undertakes. They think that they are claiming power by doing so, and will bitch about fuzz on a carpet if they think they can get away with it. That's fine-if completely deluded-for them, but to try to please this particular group of people is to stoop to one of the lowest common denominators possible.)

The three women began stomping all over each other, trying to be first to respond to this. The one that did respond said, "Yeah, but at least you're open-minded. Not like some..."
I looked over at this point: would she say it? "Al-most!", I even said out loud.
Like some-what? Who is it that open-minded types like yourselves hate? C'mon! Afraid you'll have to turn in your Nice Person badge?

But the speaker realized this and said, "...Whatever. In any case..." and went on to explain that his good intentions would shine through, regardless of gender.
(Probably not, though. If he doesn't care what the Constantly Offended population thinks, fine. If not, he'd better sign his name Ariel Waterwomyn or something every time he reviews a feminist text.)

A sort of brainstorm happened next. They decided it would be a good, "fun" idea to write a review as if the spirit of Dorothy Parker were being channeled to one of them. To be fair, they were kind of joking, and this did happen at the end of a long session of throwing out ideas. Nonetheless, I couldn't help but consider what Dorothy Parker would have thought of all this adulation from a bunch of smug, shrill, upper-middle class women who bear nothing in common with her, who she'd probably hate, were she actually here.
She also would be grimly amused, I suspect, that she seems to have taken Frida Kahlo's place as Womyn Martyr from Herstory of the Semester. Last but not least, she wrote scathing reviews of things she didn't like, so it's not like she'd ever be published in this mag, anyway.

It just went on and on. I kept thinking, "So that's what it looks like!"

They said so many stupid things, I feel I've written enough. And if they have any problem with me critiquing a "private" conversation they were having, maybe they should consider the fact that they were so damn loud that one guy left, and the rest of us couldn't hear ourselves think.

(ed.'s note: That's pretty much it. I tried to correct for grammar, but that's pretty much what I had to say about that, as of 1999. Since pretty much no one ever read my zine, I never heard back from the ladies who edited the magazine under discussion here.)

Our Fathers

In most of the recent discussions I've heard about this most annoying of primary seasons, the tone continues to be playground politics:
"I'm voting for the black one, even though he refuses to be specific about anything, because I'm black."
"Well, I'm voting for the woman, even though her entire message changes every five minutes with the polls, because I'm a woman."
"Well, I'm voting for the smily white southern dude, even though he seems to have discovered his blue-collarness five minutes ago-bringing him to question the staggering wage inequity, gutted industrial base and shamefully bad health care system in this country-because I'm a white, smily southern dude myself, and-not that I'm racist or sexist or anything-the other two seem to be saying nothing of any actual substance."

Well, the last one was a little nuanced, perhaps pointing out my own bias in this one. But I'm one of those spoilsports who always are asking that stupid question; When are we going to get around to talking about why this person should or should not be President? Not what they "are", but in what way are they competent to lead?

Fun thing is, the Republicans are doing it too, except the question is much simpler to answer: I'm voting for (crazy fuck nut) because I'm (the same type of crazy fuck nut) too.

Bill Clinton is doing a wonderful job of shitting away the last of the comparative good will he is viewed with, these days. I, like a lot of people who ostensibly should have been pleased with him as a president, spent most of his administration boiling mad about the truly awful shit he did. But these days, whenever we Libbles (as opposed to 'servatives) get together, there is plenty of wistful sighing because At least Bill was nowhere near as bad as the monster we got now.
Which is true, but no reason to turn a blind eye to the bad things he did, and maybe be honest with ourselves; a lot of what's going on now couldn't have happened without him paving the way.
In any case, he sounds like a racist shitbag every time I hear him. It's not playing well. I don't care for Hillary, but this sort of thing will make The Man With No Message president. Or worse: McCain.

So what do we have in the way of a ranking for bad presidencies? Well, I'm noticing that the original Book of Lists seems to no longer be in my posession, and the book came out in 1977, so in their list on this subject, they missed out on a number of true baddies, yet to come.
I think they hit all the classics, though. James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover (ah, but don't they really mean Coolidge?), Nixon of course.

But what's my list, in order of badness? Well...

1. George Walker Bush (2001-present)
Well, there's plenty of objections to ranking him first. For one, the sitting president is always the least popular president. History will tell, right?
Furthermore, what can I say that hasn't already been said? By me, on this blog, and everyone else who's ever commented on the subject, we've covered it pretty well, over these last seven years. But lest we forget:

This is the guy who completed the work-begun well before him, granted-of utterly dismantling the Constitution, gutting what remained of the Bill of Rights, decided that the Geneva Convention didn't matter. On his watch, we became that nation that tortures people and makes jokes about it.
His administration has created an international gulag of prisons with no serious oversight, weakened services for Veterans, managed to actually make the Middle East less stable, for fuck's sake.

Even if the army of spooks that surround the guy didn't pay off a bunch of Saudis to crash a bunch of planes and kill several thousand Americans, they at very least were warned several times that it was going to happen, and did nothing to stop it.
The federal election system is utterly undone now, and any effort to fix it, or even point out what's wrong is never to be uttered in public. The federal courts are packed with right-wing ideologues. The economy is in a ditch deeper than any it's ever seen, and unlike every other President I can say that about, Bush didn't inherit this one.

And he and his minions did more to make religion a major issue in American politics than-Oh, man...This list just begins the discussion, so let's just stop there. Space concerns.

2. Ronald Wilson Reagan (1981-89)
It's another administration where the central question is, oh, where to begin?
Well, they did a fine job of ending the notion that government is there to do good things. Matter of fact, they actively promulgated the notion that government itself is bad, and therefore so is regulation of any sort.

They re-introduced open race hatred as a political tactic, and they continued the C.I.A.'s (Vietnam era) drug-smuggling operation as a means to fund death squads in Central America, while funneling arms to despotic regimes in the Middle East.
It was determined that the environment no longer mattered, and that the best policy toward the Soviet Union was continued one-upsmanship that repeatedly left us on the brink of nuclear war.

He made it clear, once and for all, that Americans don't want ideas of any sort, they want bullshit. This has been true for a long time, but he made it policy.

3. Richard Milhous Nixon (1969-74)
The most openly criminal administration since Harding (who Nixon admired, actually) or Grant.
It is well known that Nixon's money was actually mob money, but oftentide washed in the cleansing blood of the lamb (Howard Hughes, actually), and it is also well known that the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. had long-standing ties with said mob, finding it easier to do business with them than that other thing.

Where this gets interesting is that Nixon's never well-hidden personal sense of insecurity and failure was with him (and by proxy, us) always, and this made him do funny things.
So, this corrupt, middling politician and deeply insecure little boy-man is pretty run-of-the-mill as far as men go: unfortunately, this one-after a series of precipitously timed assassinations-became president.

He sent his toady Kissinger to derail the Paris peace accords (which would have ended the Vietnam war a good seven or eight years earlier), just to fuck over Johnson, and get the Democrats out of the White House. Then, he ramped up the bombings and increased the troop levels.
Later, after spending several decades ridiculing all who recommended that we develop some sort of normalized relations with mainland China, he sent Kissinger to do just that, and is still given credit as having "opened up China".

When he was told that he couldn't invade Cambodia, he proceeded to 'secretly' bomb the living shit out of it anyway, because he could. He was the first President to wiretap private citizens, simply because they did not agree with him, and when he realized that all his crimes would eventually come back to haunt him, he used some of that good, good mob money to develop a secret intelligence unit within the West Wing.
They were from that awful melange of ex-C.I.A. spooks and Cuban right-wing nutfucks that had been following Mr. Nixon around for his entire career. It is good, I think, that they were all deeply incompetent. And the only thing that prevented the Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox from not getting the entire story later, when the questions were being asked, was Nixon firing him.
(Oh, and the entire story? That all these people were part of the conspiracy that killed Kennedy.)

Actually, my favorite story of all involves Nixon's wish for a wired nation. Via coaxial cable, all of us could shop, watch the news, communicate-whatever, from private computers that would be in every home. The only trade off? The government would easily be able to track everything you did.
And so, this early version of the Internet never got off the ground-impeachment prevented it-and they all laughed at Nixon for it. Just like always.

4. Harry S. Truman (1945-53)
In many ways, this one (seen here in his Masonic regalia) was every bit the little guy overtaken by large events that he is always portrayed as. He was a loyal foot soldier for the machine of Mr. Tom Pendergast in Kansas City (and when the old crook died, the now-President Truman went to his funeral), and learned well how to keep his mouth shut. Eventually, he was rewarded with the Vice-Presidency, since Roosevelt knew he was dying, and knew that he'd better put somebody in there with a folksy manner, and no ideas of his own.

Dropping the atomic bomb? Eh, history is still out on that one. Drafting the striking railroad workers into the army and then forcing them back to work? Shitty, yes, but on a far more benign scale than many presidents.

No, his inclusion here (and such high ranking) is for one thing only: the National Security Act.
This is the act that has kept the country I live in on a continual wartime footing for as long as I've been alive, and for most of the time my parents have been alive. It keeps this country in a perpetual state of emergency, during which the President (regardless of which one) is granted extraordinary powers. It has led to the creation of secretive intelligence-gathering bureaus that seem to have always been more trouble than they're worth, more likely than not to fuck up the big stuff, and less interested in American safety than they are in just fucking shit up.

It means that most of our economy is military in origin, the conventional thinking being that war always makes for better economies. Maybe; but not 'wars' that last sixty-plus years. You'll note that there's been plenty of recessions, inflation, stagflation and all the other things that economies do in the time since 1947.
This has utterly fucked us, it spelled the final death of the republic and the entry into empire; spreading our asses thinly across the globe, cultivating paranoia as a way of life, making our leaders feel that they can do anything, at home or abroad.

As always, the nice little man did this because he was told to by various people he felt he could trust.

5.
Hm. Buchanan? His dithering bullshit pretty much saw to it that the Civil War happened. Clinton? Can't thank him enough for NAFTA, though that was probably going to happen anyway. He did just as much damage to civil rights as any other president though; turning the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms into a fightin' wing of the government to be used for personal vendettas...Suborning perjury certainly made us look like a classy bunch. Welfare 'Reform', The Defense of Marriage Act ...Hell, he did everything the Republicans had been trying to do for years. No wonder they hated him...Ford?



Well, his is a long and varied career of cleaning up messes anyway, so it figures that he'd be the one to seriously look us all in the eye after Watergate and tell us that we would be too hurt by a lengthy investigation into exactly how badly the Constitution was damaged/ignored by Nixon. That our long national nightmare was over; the bad man has gone away, now go back to sleep.
Since the C.I.A. in particular came out of that one looking very stupid, Ford decided he was going to clean up The Agency by bringing in an outsider: George Herbert Walker Bush, who by all accounts was anything but an outsider.
But to be fair, he did fire Rumsfeld and Cheney.LBJ belongs in here, even though I feel that he may have been lied to even more deeply than any of these people. But for the same reason as Truman: he left a legacy that is awful.
His was truly the beginning of the Imperial Presidency: ever since the Gulf of Tonkin and the rewriting of the War Powers Act, pretty much whenever a President wants a war, he asks Congress-if at all-mostly as a formality.
All of his plans for finally trying to make America a more level playing field for all of its citizens? Underfunded by the War, I'm afraid. A war that he knew was a waste of time, a war he ultimately came to know could not be won, and yet he did nothing to stop it.
Until he did try, but then Nixon's people fucked him over in Paris (or was it Vienna?), you know the drill...

So...Vote?

Home of the Thousand-Pound Shithammer

So, there's another blog by a Portland stagehand. I'd heard about it, but hadn't previously been able to find it, as it is on MySpace, which I feel is retarded.
It's called Wheels to Jesus, which is a truck-loader's term, describing the action of loading a wheeled conveyance onto a truck, wheels up. I can tell that the guy is from here, as some of his friends are also stagehands that I know.

I particularly like this:
"Stagehand noun You. Seriously, I don't care what it says on your card. Just like all marines are riflemen, all theatrical technicians of any sort are stagehands. Stagehands are the infantry of show business, and upon their shoulders falls all the heavy lifting. There is no shame in this. The scenery must move, and it will not move by itself (unless the budget is truly ridiculous). You started as a stagehand, and if enough gear is in the way of complex device you must delicately adjust, you will move it, just like you used to do all day. (This doesn't mean you're going to move it while a dozen newbie box-pushers watch you)."

Yes indeed. There is also one of those ubiquitous time-lapse-photography films that is a staple of all rock documentaries, depicting the building of a professional outdoor festival stage, on his blog. In it, all the employees look like busy ants, which is both fascinating, and also somewhat of an insult: it fails to capture the intricacy of the work.
But that's okay. It doesn't pay to take your job, like yourself, too seriously. Except when you must, if you know what I mean.

For some reason, this brings me to thinking about The Antagonist, which was my paper-only 'zine that I was publishing in 1999. Remember the zine Revolution? And how all of us are now bloggers, and no one cares about zines?
Well, this isn't quite true, but I really don't read the damn things anymore, and yet if I were to do it all over again, it'd be just me, a printer, a photocopy machine and lots of clip art (I have a forest of the shit). I wouldn't bother putting it online, because on here, things mostly get lost.

The Antagonist only ran for three issues (May, June and August) in '99. It was the culmination of so many ideas I'd had for so many years, the central one being You can review Anything.
Besides, all these pieces really belonged nowhere else, and where else could I put all that fantastic clip art?
The subject matter tended to include a lengthy editorial note up front, some review demonstrating that you can, indeed, review anything, my restaurant review specifically geared for the breakfast consumer ("Slaying You Some Breakfast"), a text deconstruction, a feature called "For You Kids" that was a parody of those awful syndicated advice columns for teens 'n tweens, a review of some current album (later replaced by the "Periodic Table of My Favorite Albums"), "Media Crapshoot", 'in which we take notice of the subtle shifts in the bullshit continuum', as I described it in the first issue, an art review, a book review, "End of Relationship Theater", in which I recount the poignant/hilarious aspects of my many breakups, and several things of varying quality by various friends.

The layout itself, painstakingly crafted by me in many-hour sessions at Kinko's, tended to be grafitti cut-up in nature. Upside-down blocks of personals ads formed the background of the first issue's (subtitled 'Here Among the Great Majority of Americans') cover. The second issue's ('For the Gentleman or Lady who Drinks Whiskey out of a Fruit Jar') cover featured a great deal of that generic office clip art that is supposed to be fun and is appended to memos and reminders of potlucks. Where it should say things like "PARTY!" or "T.G.I.F.!", it instead reads "MISERY!" and "SERVITUDE!".

Inside, there is both a fictional table of contents ("I Just Wanna Do A Tribute Album To You: A rundown of all the bands who've recently acknowledged the huge influence of Foghat on today's hot new music P.12 [inset, bottom of page]") that is upside down, plus an actual table of contents. There is also a list of
"ANSWERS to Last Month's Quiz:
1. See, Maggie's Farm is like, society, man.
2. Getting the blood off your clown suit.
3. It protrudes.
4. Because I was that cowboy.
5. Yes, and look where it got him.
6. Probably not.
7. Seven.
8. If you're into that kind of thing, I guess.
9. Six pairs of Don Alvarzho tweezers.
10. Portland Hoffa.
11. "Come come, men! They couldn't hit an elephant at this dist-"

And of course, there had been no quiz, the previous month.

The third issue ('Midnight in the Garden of Good 'n Plenty') was specifically political in nature, and was adorned with lurid, darkly photocopied Stanley Tredick photos of the Watergate conspirators testifying, mixed with the William Steig drawings from Wilhelm Reich's Listen, Little Man!
By this time, the layout design was starting to spiral inward upon itself, each of the pages printed on inverted and sometimes blacked-out pages of the previous issues. This led to a look somewhat reminiscent of government documents released to the public, but with redactions.

I do a text deconstruction in this one that is a letter I received from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, supposedly written by Bill Clinton:
"This is a great time to be an American.
(Bad place to start. Reeks too strongly of bullshit. Plus, I can hear that wheezy voice of his in my mind. This is the beginning of a deadly unfunny comedy routine.)

Right now, 45 gutsy and principled Democratic senators...
(I envision richly muscled Democrats, stripped to the waist, dealing out fisty fireworks to those who oppose Our Agenda.)

Over the last few years we have revitalized the American Dream...
(It is an empty statement that is also a lie. Fascinating. The Dems are so powerful, they can revive a myth.)"

And so on. One of my favorite 'Media Crapshoot(s)' is in here; in which I go on and on about advertising campaigns that are so inept as to appear criminally negligent:

"There's a commercial for a nasal spray. The announcer builds it up nicely, then delivers the payload- "Nasalcrom. You heard right. Nasalcrom." Unintentionally underscoring how stupid a name it is. Furthermore, that 'you heard right' is a tacit acknowledgement that yes, we know our product's name sounds like 'nasal crumb'."

A list of "Occupational Hazards of Being American":

1. You might drop your corn dog and get mustard stain on your clothes.
2. Not enough vowels in Alpha Bits.

6. You dearly love cars that eat gas and are built to fall apart.
7. Your neighbors probably think everything on the news is true.

9. No matter what you do, you'll probably be sued for something.
12. Everybody's got a big chip on their shoulder about how wonderful their part of America is. You might get in a Big Fight about this.
12a. Everybody's got a big chip on their shoulder about everything, and you run a real chance of getting in a Big Fight over absolutely nothing.

15. Debate rather than discussion, counseling rather than working out your own shit, euphemism rather than honesty...
18. Thighmaster!
18a. Miracle Aminophyllin Thigh Cream!
19. No matter what they put in front of you, you'll buy it.

20. Highly religious folk who can barely read and have no sense of irony whatsoever.
21. A much-desired 'norm' that no one really seems to achieve constantly being praised as the highest ideal.

22. Our long-standing love affair with black dwarves or small-statured black folk, ala Gary Coleman, Emmanuel Lewis, that fuckin' Urkel kid, Frankie Lymon, Sammy Davis Jr., etc.
23. Yer town so small, all there is to do is git yer girlfriend pregnint.

24. No pizza beer flavor cigarette.
25. All political opinions expressible by bumper stickers and baseball caps.

26. Never can get big enough gun rack for your rocket launcher with anti-tank device.
28. There is such thing as 'The Drug Czar'.

29. Entire country has an inferiority complex.
31. Texas.

So why did it end? Well, it was a lot of work for one person, although as usual, I didn't really want anyone else screwing up my personal vision. I distributed it very sparingly, as opposed to just dropping it all over the damn place, which had been my original idea. I had envisioned it as the alternative to Portland's (then) one-and-only weekly, but then two more came along, somewhat obviating the need for a semi-monthly, especially written by one person.

I wouldn't mind trying it again, with the same recurring columns and paper-only format, but with contributions of others. Or hell; why not make it into a cooperative blog too? Hell, for a while there I owned the domain name www.antagonist.info, but all it ever said when you went there was "what the fuck did you expect?"

Family Tradition

Here's a nice juxtaposition I found on some website associated with the University of Istanbul, I guess. Personally, I don't really see much resemblance, but the image itself I find calming, somehow.
Ozzy and Cher came up in the same phase of popular music history, of course, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.

Or do they? I mean, neither of them have struck me as being the swiftest barrel in the shed, if you will. Whenever La Cher tried to make a Really Profound Comment about something, she ended up sounding like...Well, like someone who wasn't entirely in control of their own reasoning, and had no editing process. In short, like Ozzy.

The written work of John "Ozzy" Osbourne stretches back to the year o' my birth (although he claims to be celebrating his fortieth year of performing, as of 2007), and is overloaded with things that, in the hands of other writers, would be weirdly clumsy metaphors. In Ozzy's hands, I'm pretty sure one may assume he means these metaphorical-sounding things one hundred per cent.

I mean, he begins his career as any number of people did in those days: a vaguely Jesus-y hippie who has already smoked wayyy too much pot. He believes war to be Bad, but in Ozzy's case there's another wrinkle: Nuclear warfare is directly attributable to Satan.
Oh, okay. Well, nothing really wrong with that, as such. It would take only the most doctrinaire anti-war activist to say that that sort of thing is exactly what the military-industrial complex wants your stoned ass to believe, sure.
The fact that Mr. Osbourne began his career by unleashing no less than three songs (!) on this subject, spread out over three albums, is pretty fucking incredible. The song "After Forever" from Masters of Reality (1971), is nothing short of a wholesale defense of religion, albeit delivered by a deeply stupid man.

By the time we get to Black Sabbath's Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath (1973), he is far less concerned with the pernicious influence of Satan, and has decided that God is actually some sort of celestial Big Brother figure that is deeply insecure and likely to lash out at humanity in general for no particular reason. Other People are no less to blame, though, and this forms the backbone (along with the importance of smoking marijuana, and astral projection) of his entire catalogue, to say nothing of most heavy metal bands that followed in their path.

Debut albums are often the greatest albums of them all; the young, snotty and unafraid band comes charging out of the gates. Van Halen, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath: all of them had great first albums marred only by the open stupidity of their lead singers.
Black Sabbath's Black Sabbath (1970; featuring the song "Black Sabbath", I needn't remind you) wasn't just the young, angry statement of your average freshmen; it changed the game. All doomy minor chords and abuse of the low E string, it was brutal, and had no kind words for humanity at all. Psychedelic rock was dead, Death Rock was born, and O what things it would later birth.

Along the way, the music just kept getting better and better (or if not always better, certainly more experimental), and Ozzy just kept on delivering these odd little statements that he knew, deep down, he had an audience for. Kept on telling the kids to smoke pot and not give a shit what other people thought, to forsake evil...Though exactly what that was kept changing. An overwhelming picture of an aging adolescent was emerging, with no idea of what to do.
His audience was right with him on that one, too. They too had been promised better things, or had promised themselves better things, and instead, all they had were empty anthems about being Oneself, above all else. Hm.
And Ozzy just kept on getting more and more fucked up, and finally, in 1979, he left Sabbath for good.

It is a matter of myth that he bit the head off a bat. Versions of this story range from him picking the thing up from the stage, thinking it to be made of rubber, and finding out way too late that it wasn't, to the entire event being a fabrication (I mean, who brings a bat to a concert?). It is a matter of history, however, that at the first meeting between a newly solo Ozzy and his overlords at RCA records, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a dove, which he then bit the head off of. Who brings a dove to a meeting?
So, his career off to a fast start, he changes the game again. And again, the innovation lies in the music, not the lyrics. Randy Rhoads, late of the as-yet-unknown L.A. band Quiet Riot, had a guitar vocabulary that ranged from beautifully intricate classical (check the song "Dee" on Blizzard of Ozz) to beyond-Hendrix constructions that just didn't seem possible. All this being done in the rock idiom, and sure to be accepted by the already-loving masses, not feared as a new thing.
Because of his contributions, I rate Diary of A Madman amongst those that belong on the Periodic Table of My Favorite Albums. And he was done in by an idiot pilot who felt the need to offer both Randy and the hairdresser on that tour a ride in his plane, which then was buzzing the tour bus, and crashed into it, killing all aboard (the plane, that is). Mr. Rhoads is now in that pantheon of Dead Stars and Oh, What Ifs, while I've always felt it was sort of wrong that no one ever mentions the hairdresser's name.

So, at this late stage in the game, Ozzy has potent tradition and sentimentality on his side. He has tribute bands, one of which is captained by a co-worker of mine, and an audience that doesn't exactly seem to be getting younger, but at the same time, the Ozz Fests (tm) of the last fifteen years have featured enough bands that young people actually wanted to see that Ozzy may never fall from notice.
He did the last one free of charge, mind you, so rich is he. I mean, he paid the people who worked for him, but if you wanted a ticket, you walked right on in.

And more importantly, do you remember the old days when parents were scared of this goof? That this Oz-zy was going to be the thing that finally made kids bite off their parents' heads and go attempt astral projection somewhere together, whilst smoking tons of The Pot?
(Quick story: the year is 1985, and I'm watching the Ozzy/Motley Crue show at the Memorial Coliseum. The guys next to me are smoking weed out of a small brass pipe, and are hardly the only ones doing so. Security personnel materializes out of seemingly nowhere, and asks the guys, "Hey! Is that marijuana?", which causes the one holding the pipe to pause thoughtfully before finally saying, "No." The security guy says, "Okay!" and leaves. The guys next to me shrug their shoulders and continue smoking.)
But in the wake of all that has transpired in popular culture and the world since the early Eighties, Ozzy is a particularly sweet trip down memory lane for many. People like the pot smokers in the above story have long since had kids of their own, and they bring them to the show now. It's a piece of living rock history: something that draws families together.

It's all that Arena Rock shit I thought was totally dead, too: endless, masturbatory guitar solos and flashpots. I was talking to Ozzy's pyrotechnics guy when they were here the other night . He said that he'd joined this rolling fun show in 1994. First thing I did was check the hands: he still had all his fingers.
Zakk Wylde, the guitarist (you sir, are no Randy Rhoads. You're not even Jake E. Lee!), dedicated a signed guitar pick to a shrine of sorts to a co-worker of mine who died earlier this year, and Ozzy stopped and genuflected at the damn thing, too. There was a large group of people who had paid over a thousand dollars a head to get backstage, being led around by some fish from the local classic rock station. They seemed lost, still holding their autographed portraits, and kept stopping in a big, ugly flock.

The demographic makeup of the group was equally Under Fifteen and Over Forty. They had spent their Hard Earned to be led around what amounts to a Very Large Garage by some flunkies who barely gave a shit, utterly missing the Rob Zombie show (which was quite good). They had spent this money to meet a man who no longer remembers his lyrics so well, but has plenty of people in the audience who do, and often falls back on the whole "EVERY-BODY! LOUD-AHHH!!!" thing.
They came to see this man that has been so many things, ultimately ending up as this sort of Carol Channing of heavy metal: his diction, while singing, genuinely resembles hers for one, and also the same question gets asked about both of them..."People really like him/her, but why, exactly?"

Well, he's one of us. This is the first show I can remember where most stagehands made it a point to actually watch the show. Ozzy isn't a former stagehand (unlike Lemmy from Motorhead), but he's still very much like lots of people you know, at least partially because there was an Ozzy for them to try to be like, in the first place.

Waist Deep in the Big Muddy

(Heh heh heh heh. Y'know that Pete Seeger Song? About how yer followin' a stupid leader who clearly doesn't know what he's doin', and eventually his dumb ass drowns? Heh heh? Here: read a story.)
My stepfather has a pretty good footstool. He bought it at auction for, I'm suspecting, not too much. I mean, it's a perfectly serviceable footstool: swivels, and...All right. It's from Rajneeshpuram. Y' happy?

Oh? And what is/was Rajneeshpuram? Well, it was certainly news in its day. The Big Muddy Ranch in Central Oregon, not all that far from the town of Antelope, had been lying fallow for some years in 1980. Suddenly, it was purchased by an outside concern: the followers of the Bhagwan Sri Rajnish.
Or, the Baagwan Shree Rajneesh. The phonetic spelling gives you a clue as to part of what was happening here: good old nativism was going to be on the march here, against the Outsiders. Thing is, the Outsiders were genuinely bad, and the defenders weren't so hot themselves.

At that time on the streets of Portland, one could often see people clad in purple (generally: orange, red and pink were also acceptable colors), proselytizing and begging cash in roughly speaking the same way the Hare Krishnas would in airports of the day. Along with their mono-spectral clothing, all these people wore long strands of wooden beads leading to a photo-medallion. The medallion was a picture of a beatific-looking older man with a long beard and some sort of headdress indicating either great wisdom (to some) or being One of Those People (to others).
The man in the photo was the Bhagwan (born Rajneesh Chandra Mohan, in 1931), whose organization had recently been kicked out of India for being too fucking extreme. Imagine the odds. Their ashram in Poona had been the center of several rape accusations, as well as dark allegations of not-accidental violence. Like lots of people seeking cheap land, the Bhagwan headed to Oregon.
They purchased the Big Muddy Ranch for six million dollars. At its peak, it boasted 3,000 residents (Wikipedia lists it as 7,000, but the entry was pretty clearly written by a follower). The nearest town, Antelope, had 40 people.

Curiously, the listing over on religioustolerance.org doesn't mention any of the allegations of wrongdoing in India. They claim that the man and his movement came here due to personal health concerns.
Quite so: I'd never heard this before, but also according to that listing, the Bhagwan was stabbed by 'a religious zealot' shortly before the move to the States. Also, I hadn't heard that the original ashram was in Bombay, which they left due to either community protest or the need for larger facilities, depending on who you ask.

Most Rajneeshees were American or English; the sort of person (based on the few I've personally met) who needed something else post '60's spiritual/political awakening and '70's self-absorption/malaise/coke n' quaaludes. What they found in Rajneesh was a highly comfortable mishmash of partially digested philosophies from all over The East, with just enough Christianity to sound familiar. This is described in some circles as 'syncretic'. I just call it the You'll Buy Anything Syndrome.
So, along with funny clothes and chosen foreign-sounding names (Sheila Silverman, deputy to the Bhagwan and chief spokesperson, became 'Ma Anand Sheela', for instance), the Outsiders were also those liberal cultural elitists, generally from wealthy backgrounds, that folks in Central Oregon were already well on their way to hating a lot.
They also weren't fond of the men in pink jeeps, wearing pink polo shirts, sporting Uzis, who patrolled the perimeter of the newly founded Rajneeshpuram.

Building permits were being denied to the new city on the high plains. They had already made the place a working farm again, and had gone building-crazy, not really bothering with the legal particulars.
Journalists from the outside (both Spalding Gray and Christopher Hitchens have very interesting accounts of their visits there: Hitchens was particularly horrified by the sign that read "Shoes and minds must be left at the gate.") noted the daily parade of the Bhagwan in one of his many Rolls Royces, and the odd servility of the inhabitants. Well, they'd taken that Leap of Faith, and had furthermore paid a lot of money to be there: they'd better believe it, or they'd know for certain what fools they truly were.
Tired of what they viewed as petty harrassment by Wasco County authorities (and maybe it was), the Rajneeshees began grasping for a foothold in nearby Antelope. They started with the only cafe in town, which they named 'Zorba the Buddha'.

I visited the town during this time. Having no love of vegetarian food, and noting that all other items on sale were in vivid shades of red, I purchased a (can of) Coke, and a (red) t-shirt that I wish I still had.
On my order of the demon sody-pop, the incredibly spacy woman at the counter said, "Oh wow...", and turned away, leaving me there. Other, friendlier adults then stepped in, and did me the courtesy of taking my money.
It doesn't surprise me now that they were so friendly (if so very spacy): it was in their best interest to be that way. At the time it did surprise me, since the media in Oregon (and increasingly, the United States in general) routinely portrayed them as being a rabid bunch of Jim Jones-es to be. It didn't help that Ma Anand Sheela was such an awful choice as far as mouthpieces go: she spent most of her time shrieking about what a bunch of stupid people and bigots her fellow Oregonians were.

And were we? Yeah probably at first. But then, they really shouldn't have made their miracle in the desert into an armed compound. The truly awful happenings at the People's Temple in Guyana were still fresh in all our minds.
Then, they tried to expand their purview of Antelope from the cafe to the entire town. Rather than be taken over by this crimson tide of evil, the citizens voted to dis-incorporate.

Worse yet, the Rajneeshees were actively recruiting homeless people in Portland, and moving them to Wasco County, perhaps in order to sway elections. If they'd kept on at the rate they'd been going, Rajneeshpuram would have easily been the largest city in the county. Even worse than that was the whole salad-bar-bioterrorism thing.
Folks eating from salad bars in The Dalles (about 750 of them, in fact) started coming down with salmonella poisoning, which killed none, but sure did make them sick. It has been said that this was a test run for a larger mass poisoning scheduled for election day.
Lots of people don't like zoning laws, but this was spiralling horribly out of control. This was the first bio-terrorism attack in the United States, by the way. Around this time, Sheela and few other inner-circle Rajneeshees were plotting to kill the Attorney General of Oregon, and even began stalking his house.

Somewhere in here, Sheela and some followers fled, taking most of the money with them, to Germany. They started a restaurant and disco. The place was raided, and most were extradited to the United States, though some to England. Rajneesh himself fled to Charlotte, North Carolina (again with the 'health reasons'), where he was arrested and extradited to Oregon.
Later, he moved back to India, and adopted the name 'Osho'. The name, even now, bears a registered trademark symbol, in an unintentionally hilarious twist. The trademark itself is disputed, and disagreements about what 'Osho' even means continue to this day (though the most common translation, from the Japanese, is 'Friend').

If you go to the (re-incorporated) town of Antelope now and ask the locals what they thought about all that, you'll get some pretty justifiable anger about the attempted hi-jacking of their community by Outsiders, along with some ugly Christian Rightist mutterings. It's best not to ask.
There is a clumsy monument at the courthouse in The Dalles to those who got sick defending their right to a salad, and the Osho (R) movement boasts over twenty 'meditation centers' worldwide. I believe The Big Muddy is still empty, but I'm not sure.
The footstool? It's a pretty great footstool.