This is a RSS file. Copy the URL into your aggregator of choice. If you don't know what this means and want to learn more, please see: http://platial.typepad.com/news/2006/04/really_simple_t.html for more info. http://www.platial.comhttp://www.platial.com/map/One-Gigantic-Life/12662 The Pasties "One Gigantic Life" ]]> http://www.platial.com/post/1068767
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]]> 2007-03-12 23:46:22.660462+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/863900
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]]> 2006-12-10 19:09:17.336531+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/863912 [September 28, 2006] After "Bit Torrent: Bring Us Together," I went to see my old buddy Ryan's band at Mississippi Pizza in the northeast. Ryan moved to Portland from Anchorage with his noisy garage rock group The Born Losers three years ago. The Losers broke up this winter, and I'd been looking forward to seeing Ryan's new bands. I was not prepared for The Builders And The Butchers. They shunned the stage, and set up in the middle of the restaurant floor. They performed unplugged and unmiced, hammering on their guitars, banjos, mandolins and more to make up for it, and Ryan sang without using a microphone. And the music they played? You know alternate histories, stories where the Confederacy got the A-Bomb and stuff like that? The Builders And The Butchers are like an alternate history of music, where rock and roll was invented by poor kids in the South in the 1940s. When they started, the audience had a general sensation of "... What the fuck is this?" After a song or two, that turned into "This is awesome!" On some nights, the band ends the show by leaving the building one by one, and wandering off down the street, still playing their instruments. I was a little disappointed that they didn't close the show that way when I saw them, although Ryan did take his megaphone up to the stage during the last song. I'm also a little disappointed that they no longer set themselves up under covered bus stops on rainy days and play random shows around town like they did when they were first starting out. (Ryan told me about one rainy Halloween when they were playing a show at a bus stop -- and a guy walked up with an upright bass and started playing with them.)

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]]> 2006-12-13 18:56:31.868001+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/863916 [September 25, 2006] My big plan today was to trek across state-lines to Vancouver, Washington for a demonstration by world-famous masters of Wushu, Jet Li's martial art, who were performing at a movie theater in honor of the release of Fearless. After an hour and a half of buses, I discovered that the listing in the newspaper was wrong, it'd been yesterday and Friday. After that, I planned on taking it easy for the evening. The highlight of the day was running into two of my friends from back home on the bus and bringing them on a tour to my favorite bar, coffeehouse, pizza joint and playground in the neighborhood. But then I sang at a strip club instead. To preface: In my 26 years, I've only been in a strip club once, many years ago. By the end of the night, I'd decided I'd never go to one again, because it was just too easy. Too easy to spend my last $20, which I'd planned to spend on re-piercing my eyebrow. But when the Aussie told me there's a club further down the bus route that has "Stripparaoke" every Sunday night, I knew some things in my head had to change. And so it was that me, the Aussie and the Minnesotan walked into the Devil's Point to the sound of "Land of the Rising Sun," sung by a guy sharing the stage with a dancer named Valentine. Stripparaoke. It's all in the name. You're singing karaoke on the stage of the club, next to the pole, reading the lyrics off a TV screen or the projector behind you, surrounded by mirrors -- while a stripper rubs up against you, gyrates around, and occasionally flips upside-down on the pole and spreads her legs for the audience. There were some damn good songs. One guy got on stage, and told us about how one method of torture the U.S. uses against detainees is to play The Eagles loudly, for a long time. Then he sang "The Eagles Must Die." Another guy announced, "This song is from George Bush to Osama bin Laden," and sang "Never There" by Cake. "When I need you, baby? You're never there!" The Minnesotan sang "Mustang Sally," and the Aussie sang "Mack The Knife" despite the computer glitching. Myself, I chose "Kiss Off" by The Violent Femmes over the Dynamite Hack version of "Boyz in da Hood" and "Mambo #5." This wasn't the wisest choice, because as soon as the music started I realized I'm only familiar with live recordings off it and the cover Matt Hopper plays, yet I don't think I did that bad in the end. But maybe next Sunday it'll be time for "Boyz in da Hood," "Mambo #5" and perhaps even "You Can't Hurry Love" by The Supremes. Because it was a fucking blast, and I'm definitely going to become a regular.

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]]> 2006-12-13 18:51:52.396351+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/863918 [September 16, 2006] I was waiting for the bus on the corner of Couch St. and 6th Ave, and there was a guy on stilts practicing fight choreography with another guy in the parking lot of an art gallery. I am very curious what they were practicing it for.

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]]> 2006-12-13 18:49:00.003524+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/863920 [September 23, 2006] As we left for the Last Chance Underpants Dance Party, one of my friends commented on how surprisingly complex it was to decide what to wear. I'd noticed the same thing. How tight did I want my garment to be? How much flesh should it cover, or show? Do I want to be tasteful, or silly? And how much, well, wobbling is okay, and how much would be scandalous. And is scandalous even a bad thing in this situation? I'd been invited to the party by a gentleman I met at the after-party for an art show he'd organized in my neighborhood. He was also the organizer of the Underpants Dance, and several similar events in the past few months. This one was at a house in northeast Portland, and at the Aussie's behest we took a cab -- which proved to be a lengthy and frightening mistake. Portland is bilaterally symmetrical, cut down the middle by the Willamette river, with mirroring numbered streets running north-south on either side of it. The party was on the east side, just like us, but the cabbie wanted to take the freeway, so he pulled onto a bride over the Willamette -- and discovered the exit closed. And the next exit closed. We crossed the river twice, as the cabbie got increasingly more frustrated, and started driving faster and faster. The exits were closed due to an accident, and at one point it looked like we were about to T-bone a fire engine on its way there. $30 later, we were at the party, and stripped down to our party attire. (I'd settled on a pair of new Super-Man boxer shorts and my Green Lantern t-shirt. Wearing the two, I told people I was the Justice League of America.) The night featured a slew of DJs and bands (including Blitzen Trapper, who I'd been wanting to see), a game of Twister, and a whole bunch of people in their underwear. Really, of the several hundred people there, maybe half were undressed for it. The large quantity of fully-clothed people detracted from it for me. Seriously, if you aren't willing to meet the undress code, why are you going to an underwear party, unless it's to check people out? Those of you who don't know me may be experiencing a sensation of "... You went to an underwear party?" I think people imagine this sort of thing to be more risque than it actually is. The women there were wearing at least as much as you'd see them in at the beach, and many of them were wearing lingerie that was probably much less revealing than their swimsuits. (There were more guys in skimpy clothes than you'd expect to see on an American beach, but that seemed mainly done out of humor.) It was promoted as a safe-space party, where everyone was asked to respect each other's boundaries, and if anyone asked you to leave, you were supposed to leave. Lots of people would imagine the opposite, but I saw far less making-out, cuddling and displays of sexuality than I do at the usual party. (Though based on their demeanor and where their eyes were pointed, I'd swear two girls were deep in conversation about my crotch.)

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]]> 2006-12-13 18:57:30.620689+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/863923 [September 22, 2006] Last night six of us from the hostel took a field trip to the northwest, to see the largest colony of Vaux's Swifts in the world. If you click on that photo, those little black specks you see? Those are birds. Somewhere around 20,000 of them, who live in the chimney of Chapman Elementary School every September as they migrate south. Every evening in September, as the sun is setting, they gather around the chimney, and after flying all the fuck around for a while, they fly down the chimney to roost for the night, spiraling down into it like a whirlpool of birds. Lots of people come to watch the Swifts every night.

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]]> 2006-12-13 18:50:12.480803+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/863930 [October 7, 2006] Where writers have National Novel Writing Month in November and musicians have February Album Writing Month, comic creators have 24 Hour Comics Day. It starts at 9 a.m. local time, and finishes at 9 a.m. the next morning. In those 24 hours, participants try to write and draw a 24-page comic. (For perspective, 24 pages is the standard length of most American serialized comics... but most artists average about a page a day.) Portland's single 24 Hour Comics Day location this year was in the library of the Pacific Northwest College of the Arts, a building whose inside= looks like every minimalist artist loft profiled in ReadyMade Magazine, but big. I swung by around two in the afternoon for a look, and found an assortment of artists hard at work, some in groups at tables making jokes about how Batman always has the right tool for every mission, and some silent at their desks. I estimated about two dozen artists, maybe more. There's still another 10 hours left in the challenge. I wonder how many of them will finish all 24 pages.

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]]> 2006-12-13 18:20:14.344461+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/863939

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]]> 2006-12-10 20:18:24.080295+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/870246 [October 23, 2006] After the Cut Chemist/Lyrics Born show at the Crystal Ballroom, my friends decided to eat at the Montage -- which they couldn't say, without then singing "Motherfucking Montage!" in a falsetto voice, like the song from Team America: World Police. I was taken aback by how classy and fancy it looked when I walked in. Then one of the cooks bellowed "WHAAAAAAZUUUUUP?" because he saw new people in the restaurant. And then I looked down, and saw bits of paper all over the floor. All of the day's bills, scattered all over the floor. And then there was the fact that, when we ordered the Green Eggs and Spam, they made it using 17 eggs, for no apparent reason. As the waiter delivered it, he knocked my water glass into my lap, which it fell out of and shattered without getting anything more than my knees wet. The waiter was also wearing shorts, and had patches all over his apron -- like, patches in the shape of flowers or something. When we left, the staff wrapped the leftovers into a doggy bag in the shape of a squirrel made of tinfoil. I will, from henceforth, be bringing EVERYONE who comes to visit me in Portland to Montage.

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]]> 2006-12-16 19:28:59.796293+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/871602 [December 18, 2006] It was a cold, introspective day in a cold, introspective week, and I had some thinking to do about transience. So when I finished my cleaning shift, I set off for the Portland Memorial Mausoleum in Sellwood. The Mausoleum is on the edge of Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, and the back of it looks out on a marshy lake I was not prepared to see inside Portland. The Mausoleum itself spreads across two and a half city blocks and is eight stories tall. Chuck Palahniuk's book on Portland says it has 58,000 people interred in it, more people than my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska (a town of 30,000 people). His book also says it has space for 120,000 more -- around a fifth of the population of Portland. I only got to spend about 20 minutes in it before it closed for the evening. It wasn't what I was expecting -- the building was under construction for 70 years, and they only finished it in 1980, so it doesn't have the "old" feel I associate with proper cemeteries. The sections I saw (admittedly, few of them) seemed rather uniform, which makes me uncomfortable. I want to see more than just someone's name and the dates they existed between. The Mausoleum reminded me a little of Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu, where the U.S. military dead of World War II are buried -- impressive because of its shear scope, but depressing because there's no trace of who the people buried there were. The building was startling cold inside. "Isn't this place heated?" I asked the security guard as he kicked me out. "Used to be," he said behind me as I stepped into the elevator. "When it opened. But now, it'd cost the National Debt." The doors shut on his chuckling. I stared at the elevator buttons, each marked with the name of the President that the floor is named after, and chose the ground floor button. I found the door I'm come in locked, and my heart leapt at the possibility that I was stuck there for the night. But no; the Exit arrows on the wall pointed me out. Outside the Mausoleum I selected June Madrona on my iPod, and walked off through Sellwood listening to somber songs about dreams and the death of loved ones.

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]]> 2006-12-18 23:24:08.189605+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/968815
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]]> 2007-02-17 03:14:10.174594+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/863902 [September 15, 2006] Last year I discovered the concept of pillow fight club on Wikipedia -- a flash mob, where a large crowd gathers in a public space, and at a prearranged time they all pull out pillows and beat the crap out of each other. It's the sort of idea that makes me glad I exist. So I was terribly delighted to open Willamette Week the first week I was in Portland to discover a group called Pillow Fight PDX had turned it into a recurring event, with a fight scheduled for the end of the week. I bought a small heart-shaped throw pillow at Goodwill (both for the irony of beating up people with it, and so I could give it to a friend who likes such things afterwards) and showed up at O'Bryant Square a half hour late. There were still several hundred people there, mostly spectators, but in the middle was a clump of between 50 and 100 folks at any given time, clobbering each other with pillows. The number of combatants would dwindle at times, and then with a shout a new group would come running into the mix of it, adding more cotton batting and feathers to the mess. At one point, a guy who looked a bit like a high school football player took charge, splitting the battle down the middle. "You can take our lives, but you can't take our freedom!" someone shouted in a Scottish accent, and then the two sides surged at each other. The crowd really got into the silliness. "I've got bandaids!" a girl bearing a first aid kit yelled. "Q-Tips! And condoms!" There were lots of people in costume; at one point a guy was getting his picture taken on the lap of someone dressed as Santa, and when I swooped in with my camera for my own picture he yelled "Everyone sit on Santa's lap!" I ran into Mike, the Aussie bloke from the hostel I'm staying at. "Do you have a photo of someone about to hit you in the camera with a pillow?" he asked, and then swung his pillow like a windmill until I got a good picture. "I look like an evil yuppie!" he exclaimed when he saw it. I also followed him around a bit with my camera, figuring if I wanted to sell an article about the whole thing I could interview him later, or at least easily get his full name. (He confessed afterwards that he was targeting cute girls, and after hitting them with his pillow, he'd flirt with them.)

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]]> 2006-12-13 18:46:26.881198+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/1068775
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]]> 2007-03-13 00:04:36.646731+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/870224 [October 24, 2006] There is a thing of consummate beauty and specialness in Portland called MarchFourth Marching Band. MarchFourth is a 35-piece burlesque/carnival marching band featuring 15 horns, 10 percussionists, a bassist, six girls in slinky clothes who do sexy choreography, and four men on stilts who do acrobatics. The first half of the show was mostly a spectacle, but just before the intermission they invited the crowd closer, and it turned into a dance party. I don't tend to dance in public anymore (except to ska), because my dancing is big and ridiculous and I'm shy. Tonight, that went out the damn window. Oh, and did I mention that they show up in random locations around Portland, in their own firetruck? And that they make all their own costumes, and their drum harnesses are made out of welded bicycle parts?

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]]> 2006-12-16 19:22:29.429907+00:00 http://www.platial.com/post/870259 [October 29, 2006] Lines flit through my head, after I've already left. "Take care of yourself. You've got a good thing going; don't spoil it." "It's good to know you exist." And my old favorite, "I like your... everything. It's very nice. All of it." To me, delivering cheesy lines I've just thought of is often more fun than actual flirting. This isn't the shit I say when I'm seriously hitting on someone; this is what I say to a random pretty girl, and then leave, laughing at myself. But sometimes I deliver these lines in a way that gets *quite* a positive response, which usually confuses me. When I'm in the right mood, I can own my cheesy pick-up lines. It reminds me of my friend Mike the Aussie, who was once reading a newspaper on a subway and noticed a pretty girl watching him from across the train, as well as a guy behind her staring at his paper. He took out a marker and wrote, "You are very, very good-looking. (No, not the dude.)" on his paper, and held it up so she'd see it when he went back to reading the paper. Mike could sell *any* line.

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]]> 2006-12-16 19:35:04.193876+00:00