oregon, my oregon!

is there anything more western oregon than the country fair?

and i mean that in the complete sense. i don't just mean: oh, look at the hippies! i mean is anything more completely and truly western oregon than the country fair?

sure, there's hippies. the last of the few and the proud, leathery skin, wrinkles, grey hair - they are there, there's no doubt.

but there's also sorority girls in bikinis. little yuppie kids with berets and DIY, portlandia-type tattooed parents. middle-aged women with no bras and/or shirts at all. rubber-necking professors. wranglers and cowboy hats. wagons festooned with UO paraphernalia. punks and goths and frat boys and suburban wives.

yet the whole thing is so damn orderly. it's so...oregon. it's no burning man. it's no rainbow gathering. it's clearly based in a set place, it's all about the cash money exchanging hands, it's covered with volunteers. they guide your car in narrow rows and paths to an exact parking spot. everything is laid out and marked - from where your silverware goes to be washed and reused to your food scraps (for compost), glass, and other things. and yet, not completely orderly. it's not draconian state trooper style. it's a...flexible orderliness. as we were leaving, a giant SUV was sneaking in to park in an area designated for a specific group. "aw, just for five minutes", the driver wheedled the parking attendant. "i don't want to get in trouble" she said. "want a cigarette?" the driver asked hopefully. "yeah, i would like a cigarette," said the attendant, easily bought. she accepted the proffered smoke. "ok, but only for five minutes."

the country fair. it's a lovely time, and i love it, for all its surreal nature. everyone is smiling. really. everyone. from the tutu-clad volunteers, standing in the blazing sun for hours directing traffic, wishing everyone a cheery 'enjoy the fair!', to all the other fair-goers, dressed in their best, fairy skirts and lingerie pulled out from the closets, clothes dispensed with, faces painted, smiles on, everything beautiful and magical. even the timbers army put in an appearance and made thier presence known. see, this is oregon, where weird sports loyalty trumps hippie identity.

and, there's bordello-dressed kazoo-playing can-can dancing stiltwalkers. i mean, what more can you want in life?

awesome americans #2: pollock & the abstract expressionists

i think i've mentioned, probably ad nauseum, how entranced i was by europe growing up.

i couldn't help it. fine arts, culture, classical music, cool watches - let's face it, europe had it, we didn't. and i wanted to be a painter. and everything about painting came from europe - all the classical masters, all the neo-classical masters, almost all of the important movements, the important artists, everything. what was the future for an unknown person from an unknown corner of an insignificant part of the world?

until i took an art history class in high school. and i learned about the movement of the twentieth century that - for the first time in recent history - brought the capital of art out of paris and to the new world, to new york city - abstract expressionism.

i'm not an art historian, nor critic. i can't really write an essay about abstract expressionism - well, not in any reasonable time frame, and not without a lot of cribbing off of online sources, like any undergrad worth his or hers salt these days. all i can really write about is my very personal experience with abstract expressionism - and with, most specifically, the paintings of jackson pollock.

in the classroom, i learned about this seminal movement that brought the art world over the pond and to our shores just following world war II, and i felt my self swell with - let's face it - pride, at being privy to the generation that can remember when we, we!, bested the europeans at art and brought it home to america. when we somehow breached the stronghold that was art in europe - both classical and revolutionary, training and boundary-breaking - all of that happened there, and yet in one cultural shift, we came up with something new, something different, something unique.

i dutifully studied the slides of the paintings on the screen, i looked at them in my textbook. i felt the pride, sure, and i felt the urge to continue working in the fine arts field, which was now - 50 years later - more balanced, with genius and new thoughts coming from all over the world - no longer just the domain of one country or continent. but the paintings on the screen didn't really move me. they didn't really sing, didn't rock me in my gut, didn't truly captivate. there was a secret part of me that couldn't dispute the dismissals about the movement: "a bunch of paint dripped on a canvas? any six-year-old can make that!"

finally, i went to new york city myself one day - and stood before one. and i got it. 

jackson pollock was born in wyoming and grew up all over the west. and when you look at one of his paintings, up close and personal...

what do you see? movement. wide open movement. huge arcs of the arm, paint coming off the end. sweeping motions. a person walking around, all sides, of a giant canvas. movement and motion and room to spread out, freedom to do something never done before. how he must have leaned over, to get at the center of the canvas. how he must have moved, faster and slower, stepping back to view it, stepping in to add more.

so, what's the connection, between place and art? between the wide open spaces of his childhood, and the wide open gestures of his art? i don't know for certain that the two are related. but it certainly made sense to me, that day, gazing up at something i'd never seen the likes of before. and to me it did seem related - the american west and this dancing canvas before me.

and i thought, well, that's one thing maybe we - or one of us, at least - got right.

cacophony of place

i sat on the deck the other night, supremely at peace, and realized that my happiness & relaxation were related to a sound, of all things. i was responding to was the soft swish of wind through the trees, through branches and needles and broad leaves.

i started thinking about the sounds i love most -

rain hitting leaves
wind through the trees
the ocean

and realized they are nothing more than the things i am most familiar with, from growing up on the oregon coast. am i simply reacting to the known? apparently, the known provides comfort, a certain sense of familiarity and understanding and belonging.

where we live now, it's usually not windy, and the rain isn't even as reliable as before. still, i sleep with the window open, and my favorite sound here is the birds every morning and day. they start just before sunrise, going crazy in all the trees around us, a cacophony of tweets and twitters and chirps and calls. i don't think i will ever be able to live in a house again that's not surrounded by trees and bushes and the birds that perch there.

i can't identify any of them except the scrub jays, who are lurking around and calling out all day long. it'd be impossible not to know their sound. and the northern flicker, too, is very distinctive, but i don't know it immediately upon hearing - i just know that there's something in it that makes me jump up and grab the binoculars to search for the source, and then when i find it, try my best to implant it in my memory for the next time.

how long will it take before i respond to bird sounds without thinking at all?

i miss the coast.

today's regionalism brought to you by ma bell

how to define the pacific northwest?

often, it refers to just oregon & washington, once upon a time one territory, the locations of the major cities in this corner of the U.S.

sometimes, BC and alaska are thrown in - if the focus is more ecological, this makes sense, as it's the swath covered by the temperate west-side forests.

sometimes it's more broadly defined to include instead areas to the east - idaho and montana. neither really fit into any other region, unless one draws an intermountain region that encompasses the territory of the rocky mountains.

but now, this is a super cool way to think about a region, as a community of people who are definitely interconnected - as evidenced by who they talk to.

as reported in the new york times, some researchers at MIT, AT&T and IBM analyzed aggregated cellphone traffic and defined connectivity by the amount of calls sent within an area, irrespective of state boundaries.

what'd they come up with? well, that calls orginiating in and destined for certain areas stuck out. for example, louisiana and mississippi had a lot of connectivity. and the panhandle of florida connected more to alabama and georgia than the rest of florida.

and there's our beleoved PNW! oregon, washington, and the northern bit of idaho - all looking towards and talking to each other. southern idaho, on the other hand, connects - not surprisingly - with utah.

it's too bad that there's insufficient data for eastern oregon and montana, to see what communication community they belong to.

here's the original web page for this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/sunday-review/03phone-map.html?_r=1

a preview of the map they created is below. enjoy!

pride, patriotism, and uncle sam

"You hate America, don't you?" she said.

"That would be as silly as loving it," I said. "It's impossible for me to get emotional about it, because real estate doesn't interest me. It's no doubt a great flaw in my personality, but I can't think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can't believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the human soul. Virtues and vices, pleasures and pains cross boundaries at will." 


--From Mother Night, by Kurt Vonnegut


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pride (n.)

1. a high or inordinate opinion of one's own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or as displayed in bearing, conduct, etc.

2. the state or feeling of being proud.

3. a becoming or dignified sense of what is due to oneself or one's position or character; self-respect; self-esteem.

4. pleasure or satisfaction taken in something done by or belonging to oneself or believed to reflect credit upon oneself: civic pride.

pride. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pride (accessed: September 29, 2009).

pa⋅tri⋅ot⋅ism (n.)

– devoted love, support, and defense of one's country; national loyalty.

patriotism. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/patriotism (accessed: September 29, 2009).
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pride, and patriotism. these are two words i've often struggled with. i've often found the idea of being proud of being an american a little bit ludicrous. for me, the most immediate denotation of pride is definition #4 above: "pleasure or satisfaction taken in something done by or belonging to oneself". i may be an american, but that is only an accident of birth; i can't claim any sort of ownership or achievement in that. so my affiliation with the group, from the get-go, is rather a result of chance that my own personal accomplishment. then there's the thorny problem of being proud of america. proud of america? of what we've done? having grown up fully steeped in the myriad ways in which we've wronged various groups over our short history - native americans, African americans, the poor, immigrants, as well as all the ill-conceived military actions we've been involved with across the globe - there often doesn't seem a lot there to be proud of.

i do love the landscape. the recent national parks special on PBS quoted someone to that effect; that viewing the national parks was a place where people could see the landscape and be proud of their country. and yet - that still rubs me the wrong way. i can be inspired and fulfilled by the landscape, i can love it, i can think places in our country are the most beautiful in the world, but being proud of the land to me, again, implies that i had some hand in it, that there exists some relationship between my actions and its present state. which is even more preposterous than being proud of the actual country. 

and patriotism? devoted support and loyalty? that immediately sets my alarm bells ringing. that sounds a lot like we're getting in to the unconditional realm. i can unconditionally love, but unconditional support? never going to happen. 

i guess this is why i've always squirmed a little when people talk about being proud to be an american, or being a patriot. i realize others may not see these words in the same way, not so absolute and threatening. but i've never been able to figure out where i fit in in the whole discussion though.

see, i am an american, through and through - i know that now and know it's no use pretending i'll ever be anything but a product of this country and of this landscape. so, maybe instead of pride, or patriotism, what i really feel is some sort of love - love in a complicated, uneasy, begrudging way. like in the way you might love a very grouchy and unpleasant relative, an uncle sam, say, whom you know is a bit of a bastard, but let's face it - they are family, and you do love them overall, even if you don't always like them. even if you don't want to ever have to back up things that they say or support things that they do. and in some way, whether good or bad, whether you like it or not, their presence has shaped who you are and what you think and feel. so you're connected, and you love, sometimes with a sweet appreciation for all that you have and have been given, sometimes with very little like and a whole lot of anger at the actions your beloved has taken. 

happy fourth of july, y'all. 

writing therapy

so my goal is to post something every day in july.

i've been having a hard time writing lately. it's like i've fallen out of the habit, or something. so maybe just doing it every goddamn day will help kick-start that center of my brain. maybe.

sometimes, though, i'm going to post on another blog that i've been wanting to start as well - something less academic and more personal. that's at http://note-underground.blogspot.com/. but either here, or there, i'm going to try to get something out every day. which may mean, of course, that a lot of it will be crappy.

thanks for indulging me in this writing therapy.

you know you're in...

i'm kind of obsessed with place; you may have noticed. but it occurred to me the other day that when i think about place and a sense of place, i think almost exclusively of natural environments. yet there's this whole other sphere of place-based experience out there: urban.

we have lots of jokes that start follow that "you know you're in/from....when..." format ("we" as collective folks, not the royal we meaning me or even we meaning my family). but most of these relate to habits and culture. ok, of course local culture is a large part of sense of place, but is there an urban equivalent to the natural sense of place? how often can you really tell where you are in the US? if you were dropped in the middle of a city, with no native vegetation around to clue you in to at least a region, and no natives around to observe and clue you in, how many do you think you could truly identify?

i'm going to say i could know, incontrovertably, that i had landed in just a handful of very specific places. not coincidentally, those are my favorite cities in the US: the ones that are so unique, so clearly themselves, that they actually stand out from the mass of 1950s development, 4-lane streets on grids, and strip malls that is 90% of the settled country here.

san francisco

new york city

new orleans

occasionally, we get things right.