Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

Last Sunday was unbelievably gorgeous, so Jeremy and I drove around almost every part of the city, even the confusing parts of the SW. We headed down so far that I thought we should try to find Oaks Park, where the fun never ends. Actually, all the rides shut down at five o’clock and we got there at 4:45, so it was a quick scramble to ride at least one ride.

The choice was made to get on this thing, which spun you around in the air: a combination of pendulum and egg beater. I thought I’d be able to take pictures, but I was clutching my glasses for dear life and freaking out as a ten year old little kid sitting across from me was playing air guitar the whole time and rocking along to the heavy-metal music blaring on the PA system.

I’d read that this park was Portland’s answer to Coney Island, which is like comparing having your hand rolled over by a car to eating a bag of potato chips, in the way that Coney Island is terryifying and tragic and Oaks Park is full of kids skipping around eating cotten candy.

Somebody’s getting fat.

Finally, neckface revealed. Though only Katherine might have obsessed about this graffiti artist like I did, it’s nice at least to finally know a little about this person (though naturally, anticlimatic). My favorite neckface was up only briefly on the corner of 8th ave and 23rd street (see it here). And there’s a whole fan-run weblog here.

Speaking of signs, check out Matt Siber’s website, which features something called the ‘The Untitled Project’. He photographs various locals around Chicago and then meticulously removes all text from the images. It’s one of those things that makes me wonder why I never have any good ideas. My favorite was the picture of a Hooter’s billboard with just the owl left.

My friend Bobby sent me this link to Bruce Davidson on the New York Times website, where he narrates a short tour of his subway photos from the 80s. It’s torturous, in a way, because I recently ordered this book from Amazon and it won’t be delievered for another month.

The Human Clock is a must have for all desk tops.

This house, discovered in the neighborhood recently, held some strong negative Brady Bunch vibe for everyone who saw it.

Some friends of Jeremy’s and mine who moved to Chicago started a great new photoblog, Colliculus. It deals with lots of wonderful minutia of life out there.

If you checked this site yesterday (and I’m assuming here that everyone checks this site 20 times a day like I do for shear admiration value) then you may have noticed it was kaput. I think it was just that I didn’t renew my domain name. It’s not my fault. They never sent a bill.
I used all the free time I had today (since I couldn’t check this site constantly) to get back in touch with the community and start an after school program for gifted kids. And I got to hang out with Jenny and wrote a really good inscription on her new cast.

Rooting out the small, bizarre, eccentricity-driven museums of a town is one of the best ways to get to know a new place. New York has some of the greatest museums around (and I’ll go down fighting for the Natural History museum), but I much prefer the inscrutibility of something like the Museum of Jurasic Technology in L.A., a straitforward/factual collection of outdated beliefs, theorums and rumors. So since I had today off I thought I’d get out and poke around some of Portland’s smaller museums to prevent myself from lying around reading old issues of The New Yorker, People and Us.

The Kidd Museum is on the corner of SE Grand and Main street, in an area I visit or at least drive past almost daily. But you’d never know it was here since there’s no signs and zero suspicion factor of what’s going on inside (see below). I tried to open the locked door, then knocked. A woman answered and I was stupidly like, ‘are you guys… open?’ and she was ‘oh sure’. Inside it looked like an old insurance or accounting firm. The kind of place you’d pass on Flatbush Ave in Brooklyn, a big cluttered fluorescent-lit messy office. But then the lady walked into an adjoining room and flicked on a light switch and several rooms like the one pictured above popped into existence. I nearly had a heart attack.

The collection only began 30 years ago and all the toys (mostly banks) are from 1869 to 1939. It’s free to tour and the lady who let me in, seemingly in the middle of her non-toy related work day, was super friendly (in that native Portland way, where at first you think they’re going to be really mean and they turn out to be incredibly nice). This display, at 1301 SE Grand was just the tip of the iceburg. There were displays in the auto parts shops next door and across the street. And sure enough, next door in a completely average parts store was a huge surreal collection of old toys (though there were a few Star Wars toys and a Magical Mickey toy, which I had and loved as a four year old).

The place across the street was even weirder. You go up to the parts counter and have to ask to be let in to the secret room. A totally gruff auto guy is like, ’sure no problem, they’re all upstairs’ and you get to walk behind the counter through rows and rows of auto parts to a secret room filled with ancient toy banks. I couldn’t get over how weird that was. It reminded me of Orson Welles’ adaptation of The Trial, where Anthony Perkins is running through somebody’s apartment and a short hallway connects it to some weird archive or courtroom (think Terry Gilliam or Michel Gondry for that matter, too).

Turning a corner and seeing this, really scared the hell out of me.

This is the place from the outside. The little brochure I picked up explains that the owner of these auto supply stores doesn’t really have a place to show all his stuff and maybe one day will have a ‘proper’ museum. I like it this way better, but I heard there’s a whole warehouse full of toys in the area that are sitting around in crates, Raiders of the Lost Arc style.

This is the full extent of the signage. Though the guy at the parts place told me they get tourists almost every day since this is the biggest private toy collection (from that period) in the United States.

The whole time I kept wishing my fiendish collector friend Karen was with me to go nuts over all this loot. Actually, Portland is pretty amazing for toy collectors in general. There’s a new place on Burnside that has every toy you ever had or wanted when you were a kid from the 70s and 80s. Then there’s a place on Burnside, in the NE called Dr. Tooth’s that’s pretty nuts and another store in Sellwood with display case after display case of amazing stuff. My own fervent collecting really slowed down after living in NY, where there were no good deals and all you have to rely on is eBay. Now, I just want a Magical Musical Thing and a Merlin.

My other big plan was to visit the American Advertising Museum. I’d heard of this place from Jeremy before I’d even moved west and was really psyched to check it out. It’s in the Pearl. This is what I found when I got there:

It was pretty heart breaking. The woman at the coffee shop next store said they just vanished in the night about a month or two ago (oh! why didn’t I go the day I got off the plane!!??!!). This is one of those Greek mythology lessons, somehow, like don’t put things off for tomorrow when you should be doing them today. When I got home, I checked their site again and called the local number. It directed me to a long distance number whose area code I didn’t recognize. Someone from the museum picked up and said they were now located in Milwaulkee, Wisconsin (!), which I guess means there’s another reason to go out there (the first being to visit The House On the Rock).

I got out of work early last Monday and decided I would directly cross the river to North Portland to photograph some of the motels on Interstate at dusk. But I was kind of foiled by the fact that at 5:30 pm, it was still really bright. I ended up winding all around the area for the first time by myself: up Interstate to Lombard all the way to St. Johns trying to wait out the sunset. It was really worth it too, because North Portland has this strangenesss to it that is almost southern. I can’t wait to check out more stuff.

Jenny returns tomorrow evening after a six week retreat in India. Her travels through Delhi, Orissa, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh culminated with a seminar she delievered on “human values” at the ancient popular Buddhist centre of Sarnath. Jenny, the renowned Indian social activist and a close friend of the Dalai Lama, will attend an arraignment hearing Thursday morning for her dog, Oliver, who mauled twelve people while she was away.

The new McSweeney’s comes out at the end of April. It’s edited by Chris Ware, with contributions from Lynda Barry, Dan Clowes, Ira Glass and Michael Chabon. It’s fair to say I’m dying. I need it now!

I spent Saturday riding bikes around North Portland with Jeremy, Katherine, Sally and Kathy. We started at Kathy’s house and rode up to St. Johns, which is the coolest place in town. There was a 99 cent type store that sold pre-opened (and taped shut!!!) boxes of cereal. Sally found these amazing refrigerator magnets that are shaped like little 2-liter cola bottles. What’s great is that that they’re not ‘authorized’ so the obvious 7 Up ripoff is ‘7 NP’. Fanta is ‘Tanla’. Coke is ‘Cala’. Plus it has a bar called ‘Shag Nasty’s’ that we were all too afraid to check out (except Katherine, she might still be there).

A trapped in time soda fountain in downtown St. Johns.

The world’s first ATM, the cashbot 6000.

This is the cover of the latest mix tape I’ve made. For those of you who don’t regularly receive these from me in the mail, yes, I still make mix tapes at age thirty. I kinda slowed down for a while and then it picked up again. Jeremy told me about this thing Andy Warhol used to do with cologne: he’d basically wear the hell out of a certain scent for a few months and then never use it again. Then he could go back and smell the cologne and all these vivid memories would come flying back to him. I kinda try to draw a parellel with mix tapes. My formula goes: make them, overplay them, abandon them, listen to them two years later and weep.
This cover was ripped off from this documentary I saw on cable about pre-Jon Bennet southern beauty pageants. There was a show in Atlanta that all the stage moms were desparate for their kids to win called ‘Unlimited Charm’. I was going to make a stencil out of this, but I’m just not that organized.

Here’s the virtually unreadable play list. If anybody wants a CD, just send me your address.

Some recent pictures from the night Jami and Megan came into town.

Check out David Shapiro.

“You can only talk to Sprinkles through the fan!”

This modification of the theater sign matches exactly how things went last night. Linda Barry was incredible and Matt Groaning phoned it in from Malibu. It was billed as a double lecture. Barry went on first and made it known that she was super nervous and sweaty and that’s why she wore a white blouse and for those fortunate enough to be sitting close to the stage, yes, she knew she was sweating a lot. She said she was going to overcome this stagefright by singing an autobiographical song and proceeded to sing an adaptation of ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ (example: ‘I was born a meat-cutters daughter’ and further along ‘daddy was in the basement drinking vodka/mama yelled at him from upstairs’). She also managed to dance a couple of times (she dances just like Marlys), sing another song (’You Are My Sunshine’ by Jimmie Rodgers, but without opening her mouth) and get in all these amazing Lynda Barryisms. Like she was talking about when she was a kid how her friends had imaginary friends and she had to fake it. But you could tell because the friend’s imaginary friends all had these special things going on, like (above) you could only talk to Sprinkles through the electric fan. Her lecture was about how not to be miserable as an adult, a pretty usefull subject. Her idea was you had to embrace amateurishness and not self censor. And she had all these ideas about how to remember details from your childhood. It sounds very hippy dippy now that I’m writing about it. But it was just such a cool surprise to see one of my favorite writers and for it not to be a dud experience. That’s the thing I’ve noticed, whenever you go to a reading or see an author you like interviewed on TV, they always come across as being so socially retarded and you’re like, well you should still read their stuff. But Barry was like that in person, which made it a lot of fun. I’m kicking myself now for not using my mp3 player to make a bootleg recording of the show. I could have done it so easily too! Argh! The only downside was knowing Groening was on next. He started off by literally playing the audience best-of clips of the Simpsons (which he obviously has had very minimal involvement with for the last ten years). Then some jokes about Portland, some random memories of growing up here and then even more unrelated tidbits, like complaining that nobody can pronounce his name correctly. I thought he came across really unprepared and arrogant. Jeremy liked his Portland stories of what it was like downtown in the early 70s. I guess I don’t hate him. He seemed more like the archetypal Ben & Jerry millionaire than a real fatcat. Still it would have been so much better if it was just Lynda Barry. There was no signing or meet and greet afterwards. Questions could be submitted. Jeremy turned in a good one asking if an animated version of Cruddy was in the works, but it couldn’t survive in an arena where lame questions like, ‘Matt, who’s your favorite Simpsons character?’ needed to be asked.

Before the lecture, Jeremy and I went to the Jasmine Tree in the SouthWest. It was old fashioned chinese food with Regal Begal atmosphere.

Learning to Love You More, one of the best sites I’ve seen in a while.

Ooh! Ghost Towns!

One of my favorite buildings downtown. Seems abandoned. Hope it doesn’t get torn down.

Saw this at the mall. It reminded me of every truck in Louisiana.

The new Visionaire book is out and I’m totally obsessed with it. My boss got one as a present one year in NY. It was a big wooden box filled with flip books specially made by movie directors. I thought about stealing it every day because these books are far too expensive for regular people to buy.

I’ve decided to start trolling for friends on Friendster, since I’m still relatively new to Portland and am starting to feel like I’m getting too old to make new friends (like I barely remember how you even make new friends: college? shitty retail jobs??). I don’t know why I never thought of this before (it’s a searchable data base? no way!). I’m going to try to be like my friend Justine in L.A. who had this amazing gift for meeting people, who in turn endlessly introduced her to more and more people. And she did it all without the internet. I feel slightly doomed to failure by the comparison.

Thursday night is Lynda Barry at the Portland Theater!!!