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At the age of 3, I tired of urban life and moved to the sticks forever, often sucked back into cities only to earn a livelihood, but those days are over.  My entire livelihood depends on broadband Internet in a deeply rural area, recently troubled by break-ins -- tweakers from the city at the bottom of the hill.  As all of my neighbors have an Internet link via newsgroup, we've been able to set up a community Neighborhood Watch.  We can track a marauding raccoon and Mapquest the little masked bastard, let alone catch two-legged vermin when they come up here to pillage.  The Internet is a form of universal suffrage, as I see it.  It connects the other 7/8 of Oregon to Portland.

And what a teaching tool!  Or it could be, although our current system of crowding hormonal adolescents into crowded rooms to learn socializing and share microbes, and driving them down  there in buses from far up in the hills, and back ... hey, what a great system.  But a better one is underused.

I believe with all my heart that if the federal government turned over every dollar in the coffers and Fort Knox to Oregon, stood way back, and asked us to watch the money for a while because they seem to be too stupid, the investment would grow faster than, uh ... the economy would be tumescent, instead of flaccid.

Although I am an old and analog dog, yesterday I skyped for the first time.  In the middle of a move, with my pickup truck playing possum, without a phone by choice ... were it not for electronics up here, I might just get a great notion ...  and who knows how many Oregonians have been saved from cabin fever by the color TV?

$7.2 billion will probably be enough, provided Oregon receives it all.   Otherwise, most of it will go to graft, pork, and CEO bonuses.

Yes, We Can:  Rural Oregonians can fly, if we have the proper bootstraps to pull on.  But if you take away our broadband, don't you boys come up here canoeing with your city guitars and compound bows.  We'll slide right back into inbred clans and rusting Camaros up on blocks.  Only the Internet keeps us civilized.

posted 4 years, 3 months ago
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If someone can't find a job, and does not want to join the armed forces, and can find a slot in college, more power to them, and kudos for making a smart choice.  Colleges still haven't learned how to show students that abstract knowledge is ALWAYS eventually valuable, and they've become mills for industry and the military.  Once upon a time, they were what Pirsig called "Churches of Reason."

The profession of Scholar is an honorable one, and should be encouraged.  Learning new stuff on a daily basis, and passing it along after contemplation and digestion, is what our best teachers do.  And we need more teachers.

Follow your bliss, though.  Study according to your interests, not your career opportunities.  Jobs come and go, especially now, but your life's passion belongs to you.  If colleges can help you find it, and explore it, by all means enroll.

posted 4 years, 3 months ago
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Thank Goddess that educators out there are telling students about the idiocy of gambling money in hand against impossible odds.  Sure, it's fun to buy millions of dollars' worth of hope for a buck, but some people are so addicted to hope that they jack their grocery fund into the Oregon Lottery or casinos.  Their choice; but if they'd had a wise teacher in school days to tell them that it's not a good choice, maybe they would have been inoculated.

James Clavell once wrote that writers are the only ones who can actually change things for the better.  He was wrong.  Teachers do it every day, and probably a couple of times an hour, multiplied by their number of students.  God bless 'em, teachers.

posted 4 years, 3 months ago
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If I were you, I'd check out eBay. But first, I'd get on a plane with your poster and fly out here to ask Earl if he'd sign it. Bet he would. This would increase the monetary value of your poster by a lot. Although by then, you wouldn't care about a signature, because you'd have met the artist, and that experience is... priceless.

And if I were you, I'd hold on to that poster, frame it, and wait for time to pass. It's going to get more valuable. This is not an educated guess or a wild-ass flake prediction. Money in the bank, my friend.

posted 4 years, 4 months ago
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When I came to Oregon in 1958 as a child, suddenly robbed of the daily sunlight of SoCal and thrust into the foggy, cold, miserable and colorless world of rural Oregon, I got to learn about starvation. This was before food stamps or food banks, and my father was earning a dollar an hour in a sawmill, so my school lunch often consisted of ketchup sandwiches. The smells in the cafeteria were the rations of Tantalus -- this was also before the days of free school lunches, back when its cost of one quarter was paid in silver coin -- so when I got off the school bus, drooling over the macaroni and Kool-Aid supper to come in a few more hours, my nose located a blackberry patch somewhere in the woods. On the way there, I spotted a slug, but I wasn't that hungry yet. Presently I came upon the ruins of an old cabin, which blackberries had converted into a giant support cage. They were at the pinnacle of ripeness, and there were billions of them.

Some will say that a small child cannot eat two quarts of unwashed blackberries after school without suffering digestive upset. They are wrong. For one glorious week of my life, I ate blackberries as my staple diet, not counting the morning gruel or the evening crust of bread. To wash them down, I drank open water from a nearby spring, another thing you can utterly forget about doing in 2009. Feasting on those simple berries probably gave me the vitamin C overdose necessary to survive a childhood in a world full of smokers -- in those days, there were ashtrays on airplanes, hospital waiting rooms, and on theater seats, and my parents smoked even in the bathtub, not to mention inside the car during drive-in movies, so I was a pack-a-day secondhand smoker by age 10 -- and a full tummy. Even today, I don't like to cut blackberry vines.

posted 4 years, 4 months ago
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Taco Bell's Cannon Indie, as my mnemonic helps me to remember it, is a transcendental arrangement of notes. If they play anything at my memorial, I hope it's included.

"The message of a good song ..." Indefinable in words, yet we all know exactly what this means.

posted 4 years, 4 months ago
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Crossing Oregon from west to east, after you leave the Bend 'burbs and enter the desert, perhaps on a warm full-moon summer night in a Volkswagen starship microbus, you might put on a piece titled "Hocus Pocus" by Focus, a Dutch group. There are no lyrics, but there is whistling and howling. For best effect, roll all the windows down and crank the volume up to warp drive.

This is an odd kind of evocative music, especially for road trips. Too loud and robust for anyplace but the empty highway. It goes well with vintage Steppenwolf. Drive all night on the lonely ribbon of road, and just as the sun tints the horizon, put on an 8-track of Dylan or Paul Horn playing flute in the dome of the Taj Majal. Pull over and make love by an Oregon river. Do all this before 1980. Trust me, the music will stick with you to the end of days. And when anyone asks, "What kind of music moves you?", you'll have a yardstick, a reference point. On a scale of one to ten, that music at that time was an easy twelve.

posted 4 years, 4 months ago
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My mother and her husband are both around 80, still active. For the past five years, they have watched their great-grandaughter, Nattie, who is now six, for three days a week while the parents work. I asked Mom once why they had taken on such a demanding job watching Naughty ... I mean, Nattie. She replied, "We don't want to be just professional old people, sitting around. Boy, she keeps us running, too." They shower her with love, eat her cooking experiments, and give her four listening ears. Indeed, my parents look younger now than they did five years ago... And Nattie will never forget them, long into her old age.

God bless all grandparents who parent the very young.

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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Between 1967 and 1975, I also lived 50 years in the corn desert. In a certain city I will not name, every winter was the same combination of Ice Capades and Destruction Derby, as Sioux City drivers were discombobulated by snow even after a hundred years of motoring in the stuff all winter long. I recall my high school staying open in blizzard conditions because the school superintendent went outside his house and slipped on the ice. Two feet of snow and zero temperatures did not stop me from learning about Silas Marner or how our armed forces were prevailing in Vietnam.

Portland can be proud of itself for coping with this temporary interruption of our usual pleasant monsoon.

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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But not with shirt sleeves. They always match.

Still, don't underestimate the lesson of the socks. LOTS of people who know Earl are trying it out, and it's like gardening naked: Why not, but be careful who notices. Ever since those golden days, living a thousand feet from Earl's house for 7 years, my socks and gloves don't need to match.

True story: I was in the New Morning Bakery in Corvallis, wearing mismatched socks and sandals, and a total stranger came up to me, looked at my feet, and asked, "So, how's Earl?"

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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Ethan PDX's idea for emergency preparedness is timely, given that winter is on the way and we can expect more headlines about people who didn't carry ANY emergency supplies in their auto before heading out on snowy roads.

Keeping a kit at hand, at home, that includes all that might be needed if the power goes out, is simple common sense. It's not Y2K-type paranoia, but cheap insurance.

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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Oh, I can answer that one ... the press that Earl uses is a hilarious Rube-Goldberg design that runs on compressed air, and works like a dream; each sheet is placed by hand, printed, and set aside to dry on racks that were designed by some hippie genius long ago. Far from availing himself of new technology to produce his art, Earl does it -- and has done it for decades -- using simple soft technology. Just as one for-instance, the weights he uses to hold the screen down over the light box are a dozen one-gallon gas cans, painted gray and filled with cement...

There is no way to adequately describe the atmosphere of Earl's studio at night when he's shooting screens, nor the magnificent view of Mary's Peak and the meadow from the studio door the next morning. Friends come and go during the printing, but the work goes on, and the press goes shoosh, whish, clop in a rhythm you could dance to, slowly ...

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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This seems to be a brilliant topic for discussion. Intending no disrespect, Oregon's flag looks like the label on a can of discount peas, or Darth Vader's underwear. Human beings coexisted peacefully with the beaver until the covered wagons showed up and thinned everything out, so Oregon could reasonably retire a few icons in the name of state cultural diversity and history. Perhaps replace them with tributes to every Oregonian who has ever lived on this land. Eagle feathers seem appropriate, and apt.

Although we should definitely keep the state motto, because it still applies, and ditto the state slogan, the flag of Oregon needs some change, and more color. The current design may be something Nebraska would be interested in recycling after tweaks.

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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Perhaps you have already noticed that Earl's socks don't match. If you so choose, make him explain, but beware that he makes it seem so rational that you may find yourself experimenting with mismatched socks. Once or twice, and then almost daily. It begins to make actual sense.

In the unlikely event that Mr. Newman's socks match on this occasion, he may deny any knowledge of whatthesock I'm talking about, but his neighbors will confirm so I stand by it.

posted 4 years, 5 months ago
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Oregon has a national treasure, but the clock is ticking. Earl Newman is pushing 80, and he's been recognized by the Smithsonian, the Oregon Country Faire, the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, the Monterey Jazz Festival, and jazz fans in Japan as someone who has captured the essence in his art.

If the MacArthur people weren't asleep at the wheel, he would have received their grant by now. Artists are a dime a dozen; successful artists are even more rare; but Earl Newman is sui generis, in a class by himself.

On a call-in show, his neighbors and friends would swamp the lines. Earl's silkscreened posters have turned up in African huts, classic magazine cover shots, and in the final moments of the movie Sideways. Nobody in Oregon really knows he's here, and still alive, and still creating Art in simple ways.

As I said, the clock is ticking. But it's always ticking, isn't it?

posted 4 years, 6 months ago
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jesswil28 nailed the best reason for graphic novels to explode; they're wonderful teaching tools. My dad got me a box of comics when I was 4, and a year later I was reading. Reading a graphic novel is like watching television in slow motion with the sound off, a young dude told me.

What a great tool for teaching literacy ...

posted 4 years, 6 months ago
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