My trip to Conneaut Township Beach for the solar eclipse.
Pardon me for being late, but here we are one week after the total solar eclipse of 2024, as seen from Conneaut Township Park, aka Conneaut Beach, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie.
I ended up in Ohio to mitigate the risk of cloud cover. I brought my main camera and one old GoPro. I should have brought my proper tripod, but I guess I was feeling casual about it at the time that I packed the car. It was a rough shoot, mostly for posterity.
I was hitched to the wagon of a fine lady that I have been seeing for a couple of months. Her name is Phaedra. She was fine companionship.
The evening prior was cold with clear skies. We crashed in the Allegheny National Forest with a quick camp set up, just in and out. My sleep suffered from it, but the breakfast in Missy’s Arcade Restaurant in Titusville, PA, was good.
We carried on toward Erie, but we started to worry about the sky, as it was very cloudy. We rerouted on the fly based on the cloud radar forecasts, and shifted toward Ohio.
I joked to her (in all seriousness) that the geo-engineers would be in the skies today to make sure it was a good experience for all the tourists and cameras.
We got as far as we could before it was transit time for the moon, and Conneaut Township seemed like the best option.
Parking was easy. There was a parking lot designated to host all the visitors, but they were empty. We got our spot at the beach and found ourselves quite by accident immediately next to some kind of short term monument to the sun. I don’t know who the artist was.
People have a way of milling about and acting blasé in the face of rare life moments, especially children. We posted up next to a big family. I believed that we’d find scores of branded eclipse glasses or even hawkers, but there were none, and when Phaedra lost her glasses right there on the beach, the family had surplus and shared two with us.
Sure enough, tell-tale geo-engineering airplanes were criss-crossing in the sky, producing those long straight cloud lines. When you watch those evolve, they typically thin out into a haze that I always believed was meant to reduce solar radiation. It’s weird to me how infrequently average people are willing to acknowledge that these airplanes are differentiated at all from the typical exhaust you’ll see that evaporates momentarily, not leaving a flight path.
I witnessed several jets box in the sun during the lunar transit phase, and given how clear the sky looks through my camera, it sure seems like they had an effect of clearing the skies rather than seeding cloud cover.
We watched patiently through the process. I mostly watched over the camera. As the clouds dispersed, I realized that the photo exposure would always be saturated with any clear shot. I could not close the aperture and speed the shutter enough to cut out all of the natural light.
The tools in my camera kit were barely sufficient — a solar eclipse-rated lens filter is quite niche and I don’t have one. I had a lightly tinted lens plus a purple filter, so I slapped them both on. It looked kind of rad.
At the same time, I was in a race against the moon as the GoPro camera charged on a backup battery, even though I had believed it to be charged. I wanted to capture the whole sunset effect against the sands of the beach.
The beach scene, taken by the GoPro, represents approximately 11 minutes of time, as it plays at 300% of normal speed through the majority of the sequence. With exception to the fadeout split screen, all solar video is played at normal speed. The correlation between what is happening in the sky rapidly tightens and then loosens again.
The music does the same. This piece is called “Remediated,” and it is available on my BandCamp in its entirety. It is also an overlay of different points in time within the same audio file, and it comes into synchronicity only briefly, which I matched to the eclipse.
The traffic returning was out of hand, largely due to a construction project on I-80. Google Maps didn’t sufficiently warn of it, and as we waded through the interstate for a full hour, spanning maybe 3 miles, the map kept saying we were only 18 minutes delayed.
We got home around 2am, myself jacked on coffee and adrenaline, and I was quite exhausted the next day. Travel for me is rarely a vacation. In this case, it was worth it.
I couldn’t help but think about The Watchmaker Analogy while observing the eclipse, even leading up to the observation, ruminating on the idea of a total solar eclipse as something we take for granted. We have a very unique moon, in reality.
I truly cannot believe that we have a moon that was — as taught in my college Astronomy class — likely created by a chaotic meteor impact that resulted in the moon taking its shape in a perfect angular diameter compared to the observable sun from Earth. Nope. Not a coincidence. I don’t care if it’s God, a simulation, or aliens. It’s intelligent design, and it’s awesome.
Photos and reflections of my first visit in five years to the city that meant everything to me.
The Reformative Years
Early September 2003, I was in Tucson, Arizona, visiting my parents. There was a TV show on Comedy Central called Insomniac with Dave Attell, it was about life in the city at night, wherever Dave Attell was doing comedy. We watched as a family this rerun episode based in Portland, Oregon, just days before I would embark on my journey northbound, with my destination to be Portland.
Things like this could be a minor coincidence or a fractal revelation of your future.
Portland is still the only major city between San Francisco and Seattle on Interstate 5, and at the time it was little known. I grew up listening to “the Seattle sound,” bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Portland was never on the mainstream radar. In 2002, however, when the indie music revolution reached its peak, I began to notice that Portland was a new nexus for rock music.
I was in Los Angeles, a global epicenter for art and music, the region of the world in which I grew up and a good place to make a career of it. I was only twenty years old. I was managing a struggling coffee shop in Northridge called The Liquid Cube. The owner shut it down mid-summer, was laid off, so I filed for unemployment.
This was followed by my roommates deciding they wanted new arrangements. We lived like freshmen in college, sharing bedrooms. We were four dudes in a two bedroom apartment. We were not friends, we just lived together by happenstance.
These events set the stage to switch things up. I could either move deeper into LA, where the action was happening, or I could start a new life.
There was a decision made to roll the dice on Portland and it was all based on feeling and synchronicity. There was a belief that something really special was waiting for me there.
Common for a young man, I took for granted my community ties reaching back to childhood that I had around Los Angeles. Sticking around could have led to a more stable future.
Here is the thing. If I really play that out, I am positive that I would have ended up in Portland at one time or another, because countercultural communities are small and networked very well along the I-5 corridor. My tastes and inclinations would not have differed greatly, there are friends in life you are meant to meet.
My parents moved to California with no family anywhere close, so California lacked blood roots, and soil is only so much dirt. So in actuality, I was following in my parents’ footsteps, leaving behind all ties.
The life that I found in Portland was special, it could never have been planned the way it rolled out. It was not the product of carefully controlling outcomes.
Over more than fourteen years, from age twenty to thirty-five, within Portland, I went to college, performed hundreds of music shows in various bands, hosted FM radio shows, was a stand-up comic, produced seven music and arts festivals, worked a wide range of jobs, learned life skills, lived in a penthouse, lived in a tent, created and dissolved a 501c(3) and an LLC, delivered the paper, made the news, camped on mountains, swam in clean cold streams on hot days, partied on sweaty dance floors, made hundreds of friends and dozens of enemies, built and burned bridges, was broke, felt rich, and never accepted a day of boredom.
I really believe there is a life for you no matter where you are, no matter what your starting point is, and all you have to do is put yourself out there.
Returning to Portland with nine days between flights, I wanted to run around and see everything and everyone, but I soon realized that it wouldn’t be possible. There was a motivation to relive things and bring them back to life. Even in memory of the good times, it can be a grotesque corpse of happiness that you’re trying to revive.
I waited until the last minute to reach out to people and didn’t really plan anything. Played every day by ear. Part of me regrets not putting more energy into planning, but we reap exactly what we sow.
The primary reason for this visit was to celebrate the memory of Steven Schneider, the dude we called Shane. Everyone in Portland knew him as Shane. Everyone that knew him from elsewhere knew him as Steven. He was deeply embedded into the experimental art and music scene, and when he entered my life in 2006, he plugged me into it. I was beginning to outgrow the indie rock sound and he schooled me on deep improvisation. He was a founding member of my avant-garde group Death Worth Living.
Shane, Joe, and Myself (left to right) in a DWL band Portrait, Sacramento, 2007.
My mood going into the trip was a bit dampened because I had no spare money. That was almost my whole life in Portland. I had extra money in Philly for some time, most of the time in fact, because I moved back east with thousands in the bank, then worked a full-time job and bought a house, something I never achieved in Portland.
It’s challenging right now: market conditions, self-financing a start-up, declining job market, inflation, recession, tax hikes. Right now I’m balancing four different income hustles and digging out of debt.
I found myself crashing on the couch for a full week at the same place that I crashed every time I was in need from 2010 until now, a place called “The Alice Coltrane Memorial Colosseum and Wazoo.” It’s a run down apartment with a retail front, full of dudes who could not give a shit about orderliness, nor the opportunity of having a retail front on a busy street. I love em though. Don’t get me wrong. It’s great to have a place like this that I can just assume a couch position. Free is free. Of course, I’d rather have money to rent a car with full coverage and book an Airbnb from which I can host friends, and throw a party.
The first two nights, I stayed with my friend Rachel. She and her family have an Airbnb outside of town in Happy Valley that they offered me for a couple of nights. Plus she offered a spare car that she wanted to sell, a 2006 Ford Focus hatchback. If I cleaned it up, I could use it, so that was helpful. And I did.
A lot of time was spent walking alone through the city and seeing neighborhoods and specific places that I haunted, lived at or around. There is a full range of joys and traumas embedded into the scenery of that city, in part because a piece of my identity was truly wrapped into the place.
The photos that I have selected here are limited. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time shooting pictures, and when hanging out with people, myself and my friends rarely bust out phones for selfies and things like that. Toward the end, I became more purposeful about taking selfies with people. I never enjoy taking lone selfies. It is a mix of high quality pics from the Panasonic Lumix professional camera, others are from my iPhone 7. Each photo includes a caption with basic descriptions.
More context is needed to understand the personal significance each photo has to me, so if you are curious, you can read on below the photos. They are laid out in chronological order, in the sequence I took the photos.
About the Photos
The first two are from the plane heading northbound, looking east. You see Crater Lake, a place that I never got to visit and knew I wouldn’t be on this trip, so I was glad to at least get this view of the place. The next one is Three Sisters, around the city of Bend.
One of the first places I needed to visit was St. Johns. The bar historically known as Dad’s, adjacent to the historic clock in the town square that hosted the main stage for No.Fest, was replaced with a place called Central Lofts. The architecture is cheap futurism and totally clashes with the area.
The square overlooks the St. Johns Bridge, an architectural treasure and infrastructural mainline, connected to the area via Philadelphia Avenue. This is also the street where Held Gear kept a retail shop, near the corner of Ivanhoe, for a few years. Now the brand is in Philadelphia.
Below the bridge is where the Cathedral Park Jazz Festival took place. I noticed that the original poles that were used for mounting a massive canopy, built in the 1980’s, for summer concerts had been removed. My non-profit InterArts owned the canopy and I was the only person in the city that could mount it, so I was paid by the television production of Portlandia to do that, for the “Bahama Knights (Two Bananas)” sketch. I should have asked for a producer credit and another hundred bucks.
From there, I walked around industrial Southeast. Graffiti had gone nuts down there. It really is high quality, however. It is interesting because in 2003 when the city was poor, there wasn’t very much graffiti. The same with regards to homelessness.
Industrial southeast has been an epicenter for homelessness for a while. I noticed a lot of established dwellings. People rigging up plywood boxes, trailers, and other things to make a semblance of a home, all over the city.
One of the funniest bits of graffiti was “you have five days” in plain style. It’s the kind of thing that can trip you out, make you think, I only have five days!When is my flight? I think it’s a little bit of chaos magic.
Not just graffiti but murals have really exploded everywhere too. I saw this mural on Division Street by Fin Dac, depicting a woman in standing prayer position — it features a living wall taking her hair out of the 2nd dimension — when I pulled over to take a photo of an encampment with a full drum kit by the train tracks.
The night that I turned 21, I had lived in Portland for just a few weeks. The place I ended up that night was the Reel’m Inn Tavern. For several months after that, the tavern was a refuge, a place to make friends from strangers, to stave off the loneliness of being new to a city.
I started talking with this dude and I was sure I recognized his eyes. His face was familiar, but eyes don’t change as much as faces after 19 years. His name was Mike.
We got to talking about his sketchy sounding job installing microwave communication towers all over the map, something he was doing back when I drank there. We played pool. He started saying things like “You’re my new best friend.” We weren’t really drunk yet. I had said before that I wanted to go to Mt. Tabor for sunset, so he offered to take a drive up there. I looked into his eyes for signs of madness before accepting.
In no time, he went mad, loading up his rubber bullet gun and showing it to me. He pulled into a dispensary, handed me cash to grab a joint. He then drove by certain houses telling me about the people who lived there. He was nutty, but I wasn’t worried in the least.
When we got to the mountain, he brought the gun, concealing it in his waistband. I sparked the joint as we walked up the hill, coming upon the dusk view over the reservoir. He couldn’t hold still, so I let him keep walking. I was mesmerized, staring directly into the solar disk as it rolled behind the horizon, and when it had fully disappeared behind the horizon I turned around and he was gone.
It dawned on me that he could have shot me in the back of the head. Seemed like the best idea to let that situation go and enjoy a long sobering walk back to the car. It was about 40 blocks plus the hike out of the park.
The next day was Friday and I knew I had to help prepare the house for the memorial for Shane. I hadn’t yet seen inside, but the plan was to meet Todd, JP, and Jay.
The memorial was low key. I got to see a lot of people at one time. We played music, we looked at photos, recalled his stories, talked about ways to keep his work alive. That was nice, but not as many friends came as I had hoped would.
On Sunday, the four of us met up with Alice, his daughter, and rifled through a few of his things, some photos, CD’s, various small instruments and trinkets. Including a tryptic of film prints, as well as a doll from Philadelphia born artist Salihah Moore, who stayed on the farm with us for about a week, in 2007.
Scanned copies of photos from ShaneSalihah Moore “Lion of the Sea”
Monday, Memorial Day, I walked about downtown Portland, grabbed coffee and looked at a book at Powell’s. The zoo bomber installation across the street is a reminder of Portland’s anarchist bicycle culture. People would lock up a pile of ridiculous bicycles and meet weekly to ride up to the Oregon Zoo by train, then “bomb” down the hill. I never zoo bombed but I appreciate these kinds of things a lot.
On Tuesday, I headed back to St. Johns, specifically to walk the bridge and take photos. It is a photographer’s rite of passage. There is a place on the hillside that offers a clear view, so I walked there and back from Philadelphia Avenue, where I parked the car.
That night, I played music with Jerry and Pete at Jerry’s house. They are former Death Worth Living members.
I caught up at Holocene for Moritz Von Oswald, to experience what felt and sounded like the very best house music set in my life. The set was performed from Ableton Live and entirely without headphones. He’s an old timer and comes from the Berlin scene. He helped pioneer dub house.
Anything that happened that is not involved with these photos, anyone I saw or whatever else I did, is not narrated here.
The final full day, I arranged for friends Doug, Richard, and Sarah to meet me at Kenton Station, as it was a convenient location for everyone. There was a NASCAR event taking place there and I offered to submit photos to the St. Johns Review.
I was supposed to go from there to Mississippi Pizza’s Atlantis Lounge for the Live In The Depths experimental electronic music night, but instead I had one too many whiskeys followed by a 2014 Oregon pinot noir, swigged straight from the bottle, with Sarah. I swear there was some kind of time warp fermented in the spirits. It was a disorienting drunk that came on suddenly. She drove me home.
The next day was another lazy one, just hanging out.
I flew out at 6pm, so I was on a bus with time to spare at 4pm. You have to love Portland’s train to the airport. For $2.50 you can get on a bus anywhere on the system map and transfer your way to the airport from one ticket.
It was a tough flight, flying overnight and losing three hours from the clock. It was so late, but I packed a couple of whiskeys to ease the mood. After dosing off a little bit, I got to see a sunrise from the sky, just before landing.
I began to process a lot about Portland and my whole strange life, full of joys and traumas. If I was able to see everyone that I had a meaningful experience with in Portland at one time and place, it would be like a high school reunion, with tons of mutual friends, and perhaps some long standing feuds. I’d love to squash whatever shit might be leftover, and to bond again with everyone I care about. Or maybe I’m too attached to all of it.
I suppose it is a new dawn for me in Philadelphia, in life, and coming back from that trip is a reminder that building and keeping a community is a long haul and a journey.
I guess I can go back more frequently than every five years, and experience the great vacation destination that it is, plan to see people in larger gatherings maybe.
After getting back to Philly, I worked my ass off. I’m trying to work as much as possible, pay down some debts, and invest into this life I have now. Things slowed down enough for me to compile these images and write this blog, but I’m still catching up.
Don Quixote and The Enchanted Twenty-First Century
I finished Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes about a week ago. It took years to get through all 940 pages of this paperback Penguin classic, printed in 1952, with small type and thin pages.
Something that prompted me to read it was Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964). I picked that up at a used book store years ago because it is the follow up to his breakthrough work that I read over a decade ago, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), wherein he analyzed Don Quixote in the context of the onset of the Gutenberg era, after the invention of the mass printing press.
McLuhan regards the printed book as a low definition “cool” form of media, because it requires the reader to fill in the experience from their own imagination, as opposed to high definition “hot” media, which focuses your attention acutely, as in watching a film on the big screen. He describes a spectrum of media along these lines while discussing its corresponding medium, the technological continuum driving it. The printing press a medium that gives birth to an extraordinary range of media, now combined with electricity, there is an incredible evolution taking place in a rather short time span, and this greatly effects human evolution.
Marshall McLuhan photographed by Bernard Gotfryd.
Cervantes’ epic tale was originally published in two parts, first in 1605, the second in 1615, each to about 400 pages. I would finish about 100 pages and then read another book, repeating the cycle until finishing Part 1. At least a year passed until I came to Part 2. I read that without interruption.
The story begins at the moment Don Quixote reaches the brink of madness. He is about to declare himself a knight errant. This role that he desires is entirely informed by books of chivalry — epic tales of medieval knights — contemporary to Cervantes’ time. The knight errant serves no royalty directly, instead, they roam the world like superheroes, doing what is right by the natural order of God’s creation, in a strictly Catholic Christian sense.
Quixote is a Spanish property owner, regarded well in his village, a man of fair means and educated, but he is spell bound by these books which were made to appear like historic documents when they were in fact fiction. His friends see through it but they cannot persuade him otherwise because the man is extremely clever, and hard-headed.
Quixote, the self-ordained knight, takes his friend, the illiterate Sancho Panza, as his squire. Sancho is a much simpler man but he is above the servant class. He is married with a daughter, he is a property owner, but he cannot read. He is oriented in the way that McLuhan calls audile-tactile. He hears and he feels above all.
Lithographic illustration of Don Quixote riding Rocinante and Sancho Panza on Dapple.
Sancho excessively strings together proverbs, an oral tradition (also a kind of media), rather than drawing up his own words, almost like he’s building his perspective with bricks. This annoys Quixote all the time, who is visually oriented because he is literate, and excessively so because he has time for leisure. His imagination is developed enough to dream a new identity for himself, and his intellect is developed enough to rationalize it.
No sooner do they set out on their journey does Quixote act as if he’s been a knight his entire life. He’s unshakeable from his vision. He hallucinates inns for castles, sheep for soldiers, most famously windmills for giants, and much more.
Quixote promises Sancho the governorship of an island when they are through with their conquests. This one fantasy is enough for Sancho to overlook all of his master’s red flags. He manages the delusion, as often as possible toward his own benefit. Not that he isn’t loyal, he never stops believing in his master’s powers and intellect.
This premise is potent enough to put the duo into a variety of hilarious situations that amounts to a whole lot of slapstick humor, bold wit and philosophical discussion that would be hip for the time. It’s also psychedelic, if you can only imagine the hallucinations that Quixote must be going through. I wish Alejandro Jodorowsky would make Don Quixote into an epic film.
Painting of Quixote on Rocinante by Salvador Dali
McLuhan predicted in the middle of the twentieth century that human beings were on the way to adapting back into an audile-tactile orientation just at the peak of the visual-literate era.
He sees the burgeoning world of television, radio, and printed audio as an extension of the Gutenberg press. Vinyl records, magnetic tape, film, mp3 files, DVD’s, it’s all the same, in essence. It’s just accelerated by the revolution of electricity, introduced en masse in the early 20th Century. Broadcasting is a major leap in delivery, as electricity naturally wants to network itself into channels, and we have such granular modulation of electric current that we can generate infinite signal channels and nodes.
Starting around the 1920’s, every household was to possess electricity, then a radio, then a television, eventually a computer, and now a network of computers inside televisions networked by wireless radio signals in every room of the house. Multimedia was a new concept 100 years ago, now it’s ubiquitous, and we’re all producing it.
The internet is the complete realization of electrical networking, it accelerates the production and delivery of media, and this new accelerant delivers a quixotic effect on the people because it replicates reality like a hallucination. The internet is still driven by text, but that will gradually give way to more audile-tactile content like interactive virtual spaces. I don’t believe we have a media hotter than virtual reality.
Quixotic is a literal description of the character Don Quixote. It is the state of being unpredictable, impulsive, impractical, and a touch mad. It is a precarious state of mind. I have lived a precarious life full of weird situations brought about by my quixotic personality. I was raised in some ways by media. My parents worked hard and I found myself highly influenced by television, video games, music, and as I got older, film and books.
Today, children are graduating public high schools illiterate in the worst cases, unable to read traditional clocks and solve math equations in too many cases, and yet they have mastered the audile-tactile universe of the smart phone and computer technology; they are highly socialized and have developed a sophisticated oral tradition of slang not unlike proverbs, more concise and granular, but shorter in attention span as new slang doesn’t convey complex ideas and principles, it’s more about feeling.
I believe that the illiterate kids entering adult life today are most persuaded by the promises made by the highly literate, who are most capable of persuasion, by the promise of instant wealth, fame, and grandeur, conveyed in the form of audile-tactile media.
The universe inside the smart phone, accelerated by new so-called AI technology, is quite literally transforming people into knights, dames, wizards, and all manner of mythical characters, and people are posting AI generated pictures in their profiles as if it was a recent portrait.
It could not be more obvious that McLuhan and Cervantes were right, that we are becoming Don Quixote or Sancho Panza, or both. If we don’t become zealous self-led identities, we are led by them, or we alternate both patterns.
The class of people that run the machine is different from those consuming its content. They know the power they wield while most of us don’t understand the influence we’re under.
By the end of Part 1, Quixote and Sancho have been battered, bruised, starved, and humiliated before they are dragged home by their village friends by hook and by crook. Quixote cannot accept that he’s going against the grain of the world while neglecting his real life, to him, he is under an invisible siege of enchanters, that there are wizards and demons sabotaging his heroic efforts, causing his hallucinations and follies. Sancho just keeps going along with it, seduced by the promise of governing an island.
For the second part of the book, the duo is infamous. The story of their follies got around by word of mouth, until a book about him and Sancho was published unbeknownst to them.
They had become a meme.
This time they were being deliberately tricked into situations by people who read the book, including a Duke and Duchess.
In a way, it is a fake it until you make it kind of story, for his reputation precedes him and eventually Quixote is treated like a knight, and he eats it up. Sancho becomes a governor just like he was promised, appointed by the Duke.
The problem is that in reality, they are pawns in a conspiracy largely devised for the amusement of a powerful couple. They actually persuade Sancho that some of what he witnessed really was enchantment.
The thing is, that when your ego is all wrapped up in the cloak of identity, and seduced by desire, it is highly susceptible to manipulation.
What is frightening to me is that technology has caught up to the human brain. Beyond the dopamine hits provided with endless rotation on social media, which is enough to control someone’s thinking, it is reportedly possible to send and receive thoughts and feelings into individuals. The technology is being tested surely on both willing and unwilling participants.
My upbringing was unusual and social integration has always been difficult for me, so I believe that my identity suffered a substantial number of schisms, enough to make me a rather irrational, impulsive, dreamy, desperate young man.
Quixote believes that he is enchanted, but my equivalent to feeling enchanted is tied to our paradigm of surveillance and controlled opposition. That paranoia enlivens sometimes, and I don’t know if I’m wrong, because I consume media that depicts a world of conspiracy. Anyone can become a target of the powerful, especially those who stick their neck out. Not to get into details, but I’ve been set up, coerced, investigated, and surveilled, at one time or another in my life, and sometimes you have no idea it’s happening until it’s done.
All in all, my life has worked out remarkably well, as I think I’ve taken more risks with people and situations than I should have survived through. Honestly, I believe when we deviate from our true purpose to fulfill a self-identity, shit gets weird, we become vulnerable.
I cannot allow the ego to build my sense of purpose, rather it is ordained and determined by the authentic people in my life delivered by karma, which I believe is the medium of God’s grace and mercy, for I have rejected her guidance excessively out of ignorance and craving.
We do not all have a grand purpose in life. We cannot all be spectacles, and frankly that’s a difficult fate most people cannot handle.
Quixote’s ego got the best of him. Call it a mid-life crisis, his humble purpose and responsibilities must have felt droll and lacking inspiration. He is alone, apparently never married, no children, and he cares for his niece and one house maid. I think he was bored, and sad. In fact, he declares himself the Knight of the Sad Countenance at the beginning.
He dedicates his new life to Teresa Del Toboso, a woman in the neighboring village that he claims is the fairest, most virtuous, and beautiful woman on the planet. It is revealed however that he only saw her once, and never met her. It’s like a crush gone too far.
Now I can relate to that. I’ll get myself crushing on a girl and in my mind we’re already together. After my sex magic episode of TheNot-a-Podcast Show, I realized that the subconscious is easily persuaded by our imagination, as in the context of masturbating to a crush that isn’t reciprocating. Vastly more times than not, I end up crushed, because I became attached to my crush as if it were a real thing.
So long as mass media is constantly showing us a world of sex, glamour, wealth, and exoticism, some people are going to live with the anxiety that their lives don’t measure up, and will act on it, one way or another, self-destructively.
Impatience under the lure of self-image results in putting the cart before the horse.
As a young adult, I declared myself a musician before I had developed my musicianship. In my early thirties, I declared myself a journalist and publisherbefore really understanding what is entailed in starting up a magazine. I did all kinds of silly things that nobody asked for. It does not characterize my whole life, but it’s enough to see aspects of my story inside Quixote’s.
Myself in front of Don Quixote art. Photo by Megan McIsaac.
People did respect the man’s valor, for he was fearless, and survived his follies with endless determination. That kind of infamy however is much different than his self-image, and that delusion is pathetic.
Quixote would be able to speak intelligently and at length on all kinds of subjects, but he could so quickly drift from clarity and poignancy to utter nonsense derived from hallucinations and false books. I can relate to that. Consistency in thought was not my thing, rather just the ability to think and speak with confidence whilst patching logical holes on the fly, I was persuasive, and at the least people were entertained.
All I look for now, in myself and others, is consistency in thought and deed, because the compartmentalized person is not a whole person, and they can easily move you to the shit box.
Quixote was so hard-headed, you dare not contradict and challenge his profession, for he might challenge you to a dual. That was me, and that is anyone whose identity has been constructed in this way.
Around page 700, there are signs that Quixote’s wits are coming back, as his hallucinations start to go away, around the time that he is recognized by the public as a knight. It’s like he could not live in reality until reality conformed to him. By the end, he recognizes his error, but the damage is done.
After twenty years of exposure to Jiddu Krishnamurti telling me that only when we die to knowledge can we be liberated from its conditioning, that the accumulation of knowledge as dangerous, it took reading a classic story for me to see that point fully.
Like our possessions, the identity cannot be taken to the grave. Our identity is the accumulation of knowledge applied to time. In the end, it is left in the hands of those who witnessed our deeds. There is no true self outside the memory of our witnesses.
When we are young, we go through the stage of exploring the “true self” and we search it out. The hazard is that it can be corrupted and made grotesque by the images that we put on ourselves, usually influenced by media. The humbling fact of our mortal existence and the abyssal emptiness of our true self can be too much to bear, so we use self images to feel permanent.
If we see a sexy someone that turns us on, or a lovely piece of clothing, images of exotic places, bawlers throwing Benjamins around, or anything in media that draws our attention away from the painful truth of immediate existence — our loneliness, our ugliness, our internal or external poverty, our monotonies — it gives us a projection to live within, to aspire to become over time. We spend most of our lives in this conflict between our immediate selves and who we want to become in the future. The problem is there is no future, just endless immediacy.
It is a natural youthful and maybe necessary thing to invent a true self to become, but it’s a sad thing to see an older man whose life is already laid out before him, whose responsibilities are already clear.
The scary thing is that I’m 40 and I’m not positive if I’ve changed. Whenever I think I have, I repeat a cycle, then peel back the onion and wonder if there is an end to ego at all.
Today, we see a lot of film and television characters of grown up children, which I think is a real outcome of the trauma of hyper exposure to multimedia.
Entering the second part of my life, I am more focused on process than outcome, I ask God for my purpose and I watch the universe respond to my efforts to discover it, because if I’m running into constant conflict like Quixote, then surely I’m deviating.
There must be a balance between imposter syndrome and healthy self-awareness. Quixote would have benefitted from a little imposter syndrome, as he was in fact an imposter. It’s one thing to be perseverant, disciplined, it’s another to be oblivious to yourself.
Rarely does the world bless us with a true visionary, someone that sees the truth unfolding in real time, someone that perceives on a higher level. Quixote is the invention of a visionary, Cervantes, to illustrate self-deception.
Maybe we all can access truth, but I see now it can only happen by liberating ourselves from deception, and deception starts with the self.
I was twenty years old when I moved to Portland, with no connections or prospects, a truck with electrical problems, and a few hundred bucks.
I had been living in Los Angeles for two years. For every social and professional reason, I was better off staying there, in the valley. I had friends and had built connections with school, work, and inroads to the music scene. In fact, things were just beginning to cook.
My decision to move to Portland was no more educated than realizing that I could be at the intersection of the whole indie rock scene. Bands like Pavement, Built to Spill, Sleater-Kinney: This was the music I wanted to make and to be close to.
Flash forward just one year.
Almost out of nowhere, I was asked to ad hoc some psychedelic keyboard sounds for a rock band called Pink Scare. They booked a Hawkwind tribute set on Halloween, at Disjecta. They changed their name to Danava that very night.
In the parking lot after the show, the boys asked me to keep on working with Danava, and to go on tour with them a couple of weeks later.
Willamette Week blurb Halloween 2004
Hawkwind tribute set at Disjecta 2004. Myself in the right corner.
They were booked in the same LA venues that I had aspired to play: Spaceland and The Smell. The headliner was Glass Candy, supported by Chromatics.
Johnny Jewel fronted Glass Candy and wanted to be the producer that broke Danava. Greg Meleney was drumming for them under the moniker Dusty Sparkles while laying the inroads for Danava.
Glass Candy had been releasing indie 45-inch records from the late 90’s. Early in the 2000’s, there was this crossover happening where rockers were playing against drum machines and disco beats. It was a kind of trash glam that made touring more profitable.
In 2004, all of these bands were on their way to becoming national acts, but then they struggled to fill venues south of San Francisco.
Chromatics were Seattle-based, Lena Okazaki was the hot woman singer bassist at the time. Ruth Radelet, however, was the merch girl. Ruth became their star, but I remember a meek, quiet, gorgeous and poised companion to Adam Miller, the man behind the woman behind the man.
I watched Johnny work. He got shit done.
There is usually a headliner with a traveling support act, and the club books one local act. Johnny was suddenly demanding that every venue give Danava an opening slot. What a pain we were too, we had a full rock band set up with keyboards and everything.
Looking back at the Spaceland show (Los Angeles) I have to see it as a crazy fluke. Entrance was also squeezed onto that bill, probably by an industry promoter, as a solo act. I remember talking with him as we rolled joints backstage. He was on the tour circuit nonstop — he was fried. His solo act evolved into The Entrance Band, a national headlining psych blues act.
If you put that same bill together five years later, it would have sold out Spaceland or somewhere on Sunset strip.
I don’t remember who the venue booked locally, but I know there was a local band. Fourth acts on a night club bill are like third wheels. At Spaceland, Danava became the fifth act and the second third wheel.
The show barely drew 50 people that night.
After our set, this woman blew our bassist in the green room and invited us over to her echo lake loft for coke.
When the mirror cut with one line per guest floated down to me, I turned down and watched the hostess return to her room with one line on the glass. It was a bonus for her no doubt.
There were some guitars in the corner. I escaped to try and play a bit. This dude kept coming and going disoriented, first he had to tune the guitar, then he had to find a pick, and the cycle repeated, while I put together the meaning of the white trails running down his nose to the corner of his mouth.
I never have tried cocaine.
I was told that he had played guitar for The Dandy Warhols at some point, one of the biggest acts to come out of Portland in the 90’s.
San Diego at Casbah was a real sleeper, but the last show of the tour was in Oakland and it was a banger. It was a warehouse party. Greg’s free jazz buddy from Chicago Weasel Walter was there. Also, the first night a week earlier at Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco was sold out, and we had to play last, “headlining” the first show.
The only reason I found myself in that band was Zac Delorto-Blackwell aka DB. I think I filled in this gap of a best friend role for him as Monte became engrossed with college and his fiancé Brit, to whom he remains married with children.
DB filled that role for me, as everyone in my life was new.
Left to Right: Rosy, Cindy, Myself, Monty, DBChromatics Amoeba In-StoreGreg Meleney singing, Weasel Walter middle, DB rightGlass Candy at The Smell
Rewind back one year.
Zac lived with Greg, the drummer Monty, plus Zac Nelson and Justin Stimson, in a house, deep in Southeast Portland, deeper than anyone hip lived in that city back then, when it was affordable.
Everyone but Justin was new to the city, having moved down from Chicago together, they grabbed a cheap house without scrutiny. They met Justin at a bar in the Woodstock neighborhood.
Justin is a rare indigenous Portland musician. His style resembles it. He is indie as fuck with smatterings of psychedelia and seasonal depression. He introduced me to that house.
It was mid-September 2003 when I arrived in Portland, just me and my pick-up, around the autumnal equinox.
I had one week of perfect weather before relentless seasonal rain came on. When it did, the camper seal wasn’t holding up and my bed inside the truck got soaked.
I grabbed a YMCA membership to revive myself in the mornings and explored the city, sunrise to sunset, applying for jobs everywhere. My mother had given me a cell phone.
Mostly, I hung around the West side. I saw Carrie Brownstein downtown, then never again until I worked on a Portlandia episode. Earlier that year I saw them her band Sleater-Kinney open for The Black Keys in LA.
Compared to the LA area and Tucson where I grew up, Portland was an old city, featuring the kind of ancient looking infrastructure that I only saw in movies.
The alphabet blocks famously associated with Simpsons characters (Burnside, Quimby, Flanders, Lovejoy, and more) were my first stomping grounds. It’s where I parked my truck and discovered places and applied for jobs. That part of town went through gentrification already. It was fresh enough to me that I was satisfied, but I didn’t realize how little character it had.
One day, someone told me to check out southeast Portland, especially Hawthorne Street, so I did. I couldn’t believe that I had ignored all of East Portland. This was much more my vibe. It was hippy, artsy, and a bit edgy.
From Hawthorne, I kept exploring, eventually finding 26th & Clinton St. I was smitten.
The corner back then had a cooperatively owned record shop called Q is for Choir, an esoteric video rental store, a punk record shop, an historic theatre with a decades running Rocky Horror Picture Show night, quirky bars and restaurants, a food co-op down toward Powell, and it was surrounded by picturesque American suburban homes.
I was down to my last fifty bucks by this time and was about to make the long drive home to Tucson. In the last minute, sitting in Q is for Choir, I got a call on my flip phone. I was asked to come in for a job interview at a place on Hawthorne and was hired on the spot.
Down the street from the K&F coffee shop, posted to a cork board, I found advertised on a handwritten note a room for rent by a Bulgarian widow occupying the same family home since The Great Depression, just a block away.
She kept three units upstairs for rent for $200 per month. All of them were vacant. She let me in with no money, only promises.
A little west on Division Street, there was a coop coffee shop called The Red & Black Cafe. They bought their baked goods and coffee from other cooperatively owned local businesses, featured local music and art. I went there to use the iMac, even after I got a computer by volunteering at Free Geek because my room had no internet.
One of the first shows I went to in Portland was Dead Moon, at The Twilight on Powell. I was barely 21. It was the best. Saw them several times after that. It was actually Pearl Jam covering “It’s O.K.” that turned me on to them.
My favorite bar became the Reel ‘M Inn, a place where everyone alike got drunk for $1 per Pabst and I only remember friendly banter across all social or political topics.
Within a month of moving to town, I met Justin. We worked at a place on Division Street. It was a terrible job. The busser was the dishwasher, and the kitchen was poorly equipped to handle any serious volume. We got crap for tips while the serving staff had cocaine habits.
One night, I was laying in bed and I was terribly depressed. I got a call from Justin. He urged me to get out and come over to Red & Black. I knew it was best for me so I peeled out of bed.
He introduced me to his band The Marmits. It was a crazy performance art thing, with characters each developed by the members of the group. They played these heavy and intricately structured songs with harmonies that purposefully countered accepted norms. I felt like this was an indie rock version of The Residents.
Even though I didn’t per se like Marmits, I couldn’t deny that it was creative, that he believed in his own madness, and that should be enough to earn the support of a friend. It was meant to challenge and upset the audience.
Shortly after that, he invited me over to his house. This is when I met the Danava guys. Justin shared the basement space alike at the house, crashing on a mattress on the floor in the garage for like $100 a month. He invited me over to work on some music. He was always looking for people to join his bands, and I wasn’t into that, so it didn’t go anywhere. “I just want to jam, bro!” I remember saying to him.
This has always been a thorn in my side. Songwriters will be like, “Yeah, let’s jam.” Then you show up, and suddenly your improvisation is turning into form with a verse, chorus, and bridge with a turnaround. There you think you’re jamming, but you’re being pushed into someone’s tune. It’s a lame thing to do.
Early in 2004, they all disbanded to different houses. Monte moved in with Brit to this studio apartment with a hideaway bed downtown, in fact I helped them move. Zac Nelson went to Sacramento with his woman. DB and Greg found a small house with a basement around Fremont and MLK. This became Danava headquarters, with moody lighting, a grand old Lowery organ, and a nasty old basement ideal for a metal band.
Justin bounced around for a while after this. I don’t know when, but he ended up with Jeff, his bassist, who had a house on Denver Avenue that became known as The Salad House. The name was earned as they would prepare a huge probiotic salad for every house show.
Jeff moved down from South Dakota with his friends Glass and Head. All three of these guys nudged me one way or another at some point, having substantial impact on this narrative.
Justin’s scene clashed a bit with Danava. They didn’t naturally fit on bills at clubs and so the social scene didn’t often mix either. It’s natural, but not personal.
There is a self-sustaining aspect to scenes, especially Justin’s. He had cousins that also played in bands, and had basements, and they could easily put on a party between them.
Things were going smooth in some ways, but I was fired from four jobs in a row, within the first six months in Portland.
This was unprecedented in my life. Portland, at that time, had one of the highest unemployment rates. I learned what replaceable meant.
I began studying at Portland Community College part-time while continuing to work.
The fourth job was Grand Central Bowl. This was a layoff. The place was a dive. Working there for 2.9 months was amazing, however.
This infamous woman who burned out of the scene produced a series called Rock and Bowl, bringing bands like Thrones, Get Hustle, and Pink Scare to the grimy bowling alley.
I started running into DB more often, we would have lively conversations. Then we just started hanging out.
Justin would draw you into drinking and smoking until dawn, but would be useless all day. DB would get fucked up, crash at night, wake up ready to go for a hike on a mountain and talk about literature, film, and politics along the way. He had a way of observing human behavior, a street sense that I didn’t have. Our pace in life matched where it counted and that’s how friendship are made.
My heart was and is with nerds like Thom Yorke and Steven Malkmus. These were my favorite players, until I discovered vastly more variety.
After joining Danava, my social access reached far beyond my capacity to handle it. I had to catch up on the esoteric hipster lineage of music, bands like Can, Silver Apples, Sir Lord Baltimore, old James Brown and soul records, less Beatles more Stones, Piper at the Gates of Dawn not Dark Side of the Moon. Just to keep a conversation, I needed to run the gamut. And I loved it.
Especially before widespread internet, you discovered obscure music by reading zines, and you discovered that below the surface of the artists that make it to Spin or Vice magazines, there were influences, and you could end up spending your paycheck at record stores. For example, Radiohead is understood by checking out early REM, Penderecki, and Aphex Twin, to name a few. To get Aphex Twin, listen to 1980’s hip hop and house, Brian Eno, and Kraftwerk. To get Brian Eno listen to the OM box set plus Beatles. It’s a fun ride, music, this journey just goes on forever.
One band that I’m glad I got to see is Thinking Feller’s Union Local 282 with Monte and DB at Berbati’s Pan. I had read about them in Sound Collector Magazine, a publication that helped nudge me to Portland. Thinking Fellers were awesome. At that show, my worlds collided and my stomach went into knots as Steven Malkmus and Doug Marsch were just hanging out. What a fan boy I felt like! This was the moment I waited for and I had a stomach ache.
DB and I started jamming, actually jamming. After getting some ideas on tape, he had the idea to bring me in on the Hawkwind set and generate some good noisy sounds for the tribute act.
That brings us back to Halloween 2004, at Disjecta, immediately followed by the Glass Candy tour.
As I was challenged to play more complicated music with Danava. I was self-producing on my Tascam 4-Track, quite a lot.
I started teaching myself Danava’s guitar parts. I was trying to get more involved in the band. It was not what Greg expected or wanted from me. So I was axed. He found a happy-go-lucky handsome guy with killer synthesizers that looked amazing in a white suit.
I relearned what replaceable meant.
It wasn’t just that. I was also filling in for Rosy Cross. He was their mascot, performance artist, and noise guy. He went on tour with us but left town shortly after, and they really just needed someone to at least run his parts.
When Rosy Cross came back, they went without a second keyboardist for a minute. Then they grabbed the other guy.
I was bummed. DB helped me understand, softening the blow. I was on their permanent guest list for years after that. No hard feelings.
I tried to form my own band. I had a three song demo on CD-R and I shared it with anyone that said they could play. Several people said it was too advanced. I could not believe that. Then I realized indie players got into ruts of strumming and drumming in a handful of patterns all the time. It becomes rote and unconscious. Most players cannot accommodate a range of styles in a given set.
Untitled song from untitled demo by Myself circa 2005
This is another industry lesson. Low hanging fruit isn’t always ripe.
The Present is the History of the Future
I had been working at Widmer Brewing Company. At Widmer, I met Jason Morales. We got along right away as self-identified outcasts. The dishwashers are the underdog usually across the board in life. Sometimes you have a great artist in there that doesn’t want responsibility. All of the dishwashers there were musicians, all but one.
Pretty soon, Jay and I were forming a progressive rock band with Dylan Reily. All of us had coincidentally lived in Tucson at some time.
We put together a set: a sludgy metal song, a dance number, a surf rock groove, and a jazzy number. Plus we covered “Many Mansions” by Sonny Sharrock.
We called the band The History of The Future.
In full progressive rock fashion, I bought a heavy double decker synth stand, a Yamaha DX7, and a weird Korg analog synth with digital presets. I don’t remember the model.
The band was tied into three scenes at this point. My scene, Jay’s free jazz scene, and then through Dylan’s segment of the rock scene, this one fusing country and punk, largely composed of the players who came of age in 90’s Portland. The Juanita Family and Friends tied them all together. Lana Rebel led that band and sometimes I see her in Tucson, where she owns a record store.
History of the Future at Acme, January 2006
We became a regular act at Dunes. We opened for Big Business at their first show. This band became a national headliner.
DB recommended to Greg that we have an opening slot for Danava and Snow Foxxes, at Holocene. I think Greg was a little nervous that we would suck, however, we rehearsed heavily and he was pleasantly surprised. The consensus became that we’d run that lineup again.
I set up a show that crossed over social scenes at Acme, featuring Marmits. They got the weekly writeup, even though I produced the show. Plankton ended up doing the first iteration of what became Eternal Tapestry. Another fluke, as they became a local headliner and a touring act.
Weekly paper write ups for shows we did not manage to get a writeup for.
Our final show came before we knew it. I don’t remember if it was opening for Federation X at Dunes, or the second Big Business show at the same venue. In any case, I was blindsided when Jay said the band was over, immediately after the show. I think Dylan was too.
March 1, 2006, History of the Future opening for Federation X
We didn’t even take the time for a recording session. All we had was a dirty cassette from a sloppy show early on at The Know.
The band ended because Matty didn’t feel it anymore. This is the tragedy of the indie music scene. The band is usually hinging on players that are not in it for the long haul. If success begins to approach, someone wants to pull out, almost every time.
We could have replaced him, but we didn’t. There was a clear path for us being an opening act for bigger acts, a support band locally and on tour. That is how some bands find their niche.
I remember DB at the show with Federation X. He helped me produce the poster. The other band on the bill was I Am the Arm, led by Boyd Anderson. It was the beginning of shared friendship.
Danava continued growing and Greg became the sole permanent member within several years. He was always the sole songwriter. Rosy was the first to leave, then Monty, then the other keyboardist, and finally Zac.
As of this writing, Danava is actively producing another album.
School and Rooms
Although I loved 26th and Clinton, my landlord forbade guests, and she was a crotchety old senile woman with hearing loss. She was great, but I was young and hard-headed, so I found another room pretty quickly, early 2004.
It was around 55th and Powell, on Lafayette Street. I could fit my little studio comfortably: drum machine, two guitars, bass, keyboard, and microphones. I recorded demos to tape and mastered CD-R copies using stereo track editors like Sound Forge.
All but top right corner are from Lafayette Street room. The other is 26th Ave.
Life on Lafayette was good for a while. The household somehow found balance with a mix of different but eccentric people. I first learned gardening at this house.
I did salvia divinorum in the yard — might have jumped dimensions unwittingly.
Roommates changed over. Things got sour. I bounced from there spring 2005.
The next place came on SE 11th at the corner of Sherman. It was a dump. The cast of characters in there was like a joke.
The first day, I was taking over a punk rocker’s room. He nearly knocked my head off when I pulled his stuff out of the room the day I got there. If you need evidence of my Asperger’s there it is: I had no idea putting my hands on his stuff would bother him.
This nu-metalhead character lived off the kitchen. He was replaced with a seeming normal dude, but in AA who soon relapsed and moved out to avoid our partying. There was a goth character who worked in a lab that took five showers a day. He moved out and this adorable shopping mall kind of gal moved in. She must have liked coke because she very quickly coupled up with the Bostonian man with absolutely no sense of fashion but loved cocaine. Soon, his old buddy, a washed up soap opera actor (coke addict) moved to town. He stayed on the couch a while and then found his own place.
Across the street lived a guy who loved Rumi and Moly. He had a polyamorous friend that would disrupt my long dry spell from sex. She was a tattoo goth type with opiate pill addiction, and to my amazement had seven clitoral piercings. I badly needed anything.
The floors were junk. The stairs were off level. The basement was molding. But the anything goes mentality matched mine.
There was a band called Mr. Seed that previously lived there and left a bunch of gear behind, never claiming it so long as I was there. I used that shit and set up my studio.
Rent was $225 a month. The location was excellent. On a bike, I could get to almost every music venue and worthwhile bar in ten minutes or less.
This was already post-Danava, and toward the end of History of the Future. DB was tired of living with his band leader, so when the AA guy moved out, he moved in.
After we were roommates, it got out of hand, in a fun way. We got fucked up at the bar to come home and jam at midnight. We used the house as an after party venue from shows.
There was a lot of ecstasy going around. We would watch these people get the shakes and red faced and grope each other. I am almost positive that we were given that shit in a chocolate one time that was supposed to be shrooms. That night we ate those and drank whiskey. When I got home I was ecstatic, throwing things around and dancing like a madman.
One day, DB ran into Boyd Anderson, bassist from I Am the Arm, a band that shared a bill with History of the Future and was getting good shows at the time. He was in the neighborhood. Boyd was more like us. He liked the weirdest range of music, films, ideas, and wasn’t into the superficialities of the scene. He smoked hella weed.
We organized a jam, the three of us plus a drummer named Chuck, and Daniel from Hustler White on keys. It was fun. We talked about doing it again. The idea was only to be a jam band, a rotating local lineup, to be called Keep Portland Weird.
In 2005, I joined KBOO Community Radio as a volunteer engineer. I had a trade certificate from Sound Master in North Hollywood, so they fast tracked me through orientation right into operation.
The Fourth of July weekend traditionally had a long live simulcast event on KBOO from Blues Fest. We had a new digital system plus the original analog back up transmitter. I remember sitting there monitoring the signal holding bottled water on an old IBM touchpad to act as a heat sink.
I biked over the closing night just to help strike the broadcast booth and watch fireworks. I took a little mushrooms just before heading. When we finished loading the vehicle, I biked home.
Along the way, I went to Tennessee Red’s on 11th. The bartender had the craziest destiny delivering drink special of all time. It was a double shot, featuring half Amaretto and 151, for three bucks.
I ran into some familiar faces at the bar, was feeling great, probably had two of those with beer.
I don’t recall the time between laughing with friends and being discovered by Boyd in the street alone. He just happened to see me as I was puking. I recall that, and that’s all.
When I woke up in my bed, hung over, having forgotten my night, my roommates were demanding that I move out because they didn’t feel safe. Apparently, I had thrown shit around and made quite a ruckus, entirely blacked out.
Tension had mounted for a while. DB fueled my hatred for them, because he was a bigger shit talker. Not that he was two-faced, but I can’t compartmentalize like that, so I’ll talk shit at them. They never went to our shows, or any show, they never checked out a new film, or read books, they just did coke, ecstasy, went to the same bars every night and talked about the same bullshit over bar games.
It was for sure the best thing to leave that house. However, it was abrupt. I could have fought it, but I would rather bounce than live where I’m not wanted.
Bounce I did, into a super weird house. This house was right off Mississippi Avenue, at the time of its gentrification. I found it on Craigslist, it was $300 monthly for a bedroom, and I could move in immediately.
The house was occupied by a couple whose names I won’t repeat. They were hippies with a band. They played at Red & Black Café and pushed CD’s. The patriarch was aggressive, intimidating, even though he projected himself through an image of enlightenment. I think he was some kind of gangster in the psychedelic drug trade. I believe he warped his wife’s mind. This guy could be an MK Ultra case maybe. It was bad vibes, but I was in a hurry and didn’t see that. I was on a budget. I was attracted to it because they were also building a music studio. It took time to see how weird it was.
Jeff, from the Salad House, came over one time after work.
Myself or Justin got him a job at Widmer. There was a bit that I worked with Justin — I for sure got Justin the job. Jay had moved on by then, in fact, lost his job due to the actions of the same guy that quit the band because the dude got too wasted in Seattle to drive home.
Jeff quickly advanced over me from Dishwasher because he was super focused, sober, on a health kick and losing weight. His energy was top notch and understood the importance of hard work. I was still a punk.
When Jeff saw the place, he was polite about it. Later in the week, he said, “The energy is fucked over there, you have to get out.”
He was leaving Portland and suggested I take his room. The rent hit my target of $300 a month. It was settled right in time for the end of summer, ahead of the fall quarter of my final year at PCC.
I was sitting on the back porch with Glass reminiscing on summer’s end. He had the idea of heading up to our favorite place to camp: Buck Lake. This was an obscure spot that mostly trippers, artists, and camping enthusiasts knew about. It remains a tough hike to get into, but pretty well known.
It was mid-September, and school was starting within a week. I had already enrolled and was facing one final stretch of full-time study to earn my degree. I quit Widmer to focus.
I was selling mushrooms on the side and I had a fat dose saved. There was a single four gram mushroom, if I recall.
I believe I took four grams and Glass took a similar amount, in stages. I lost the bag, until we peaked and it was the perfect time to finish the dose. One turn of the flashlight revealed them on the ground to my left, behind me.
Visualizations got more intense and vivid in this session than any other time in my life. The most memorable event was Justin’s face floating down from space and then covering my face like a mask. I told him and it made him uncomfortable, and me too.
I wanted to do a Keep Portland Weird housewarming show, but too much time had passed. I had Chuck and Boyd from the original crew willing to do it, but DB on tour I believe. Then Chuck dropped out.
I was frustrated, complaining in the kitchen when Glass pointed out the obvious: Jay Morales. Jay was there for the party.
Glass played in Mr. Frederick with Justin on drums, but he knew he was the wrong guy for this moment. He was also a History of the Future fan and knew Jay could rock a set. So we did it. This was what I considered to be the first iteration of Death Worth Living. The personnel became Ali Ippolito, Anthony T. Schatz, Jason Morales, Boyd Anderson, and myself.
By now, I had upgraded my studio with from the four-track to a Pro Tools 5.1 rig. We got a clean recording with isolated instruments. The band found two strong pockets, good enough to isolate and put on MySpace. And back then, that was enough to start a band.
“Voices of the Wilderness” is the first DWL recording
Things were off to a great start for me at the salad house.
I was also eager to use this rig to realize my dream of producing music. The obvious choice to start was to record Mr. Frederick. I offered to produce them.
One day, in the midst of a session, Justin and I got into an ego battle. Ali was there as part of the session. As Justin and I got heated and argued senselessly, Ali looking on concerned, Glass got up off the drums, walked right up to us, whipped out his hog onto the desk and looked us right in the eye. The move cracked all tensions like hot water on ice. We all laughed hysterically. After a few seconds, he tucked away his surprisingly large shaft and walked out of the room for a smoke, Zen as fuck.
The tension was broken for the minute, but Justin and I clashed the following weeks and months, and we didn’t finish his album.
I studied outside of the house and partied at home. Everything seemed ideal, way better than dorm life, and I was now within walking distance of school.
That year, I started to put credits into professional music training: piano, group voice, theory, and jazz history. This was in addition to a wide range of subjects: physics, anthropology, film, and philosophy. It was a wonderful year of hard study. Living the student and artist lifestyle truly was awesome the way that I did it. The facilities and quality of instruction at Portland Community College was easily on par with small universities, only I got to live the musician meanwhile.
Glass, however, was crashing on our couch, depressed, going through a breakup, watching Lost on DVD for days on end, with Evelyn Weston, the new roommate-girlfriend of our roommate Head. She was also depressed and in a funk.
I couldn’t believe them. Both of them could easily find work but were choosing this pathetic outlook. I was bugged, until they outshined me. Their strategy proved itself over time, as I watched them both elevate their lives after finishing the DVD collection.
Glass’ holdout against all other employers worked and he went to work at Stumptown Coffee. Things turned around dramatically for him. He met a new friend and collaborator named Josh and together they formed a new band. That band remains today an active national touring headliner whose music has been featured in television and film.
Evelyn ran into someone at Ace Hotel, where she worked under the table for a pittance. This someone was selling photo booths. She suddenly became the regional manager of photo booth sales for a company with a monopoly in Portland. With her connections, those booths became ubiquitous, inside every cool night club.
Test Image from Evelyn’s Phone Booth
Life at salad house deteriorated. I was far more disciplined than they were, in cleaning, sleeping, and making purposeful spaces in the house. If you don’t accept in advance who you are going to live with, then resentment will definitely grow.
Meanwhile, I was seeing DB less and less. His band was growing fast. Kemado Records signed them, got them into a new van, upgraded their instruments, and put them on tour.
DB is the authentic guy in a sea of fakeness called hipsterdom. I didn’t really have friends from Danava’s scene because they are by and large lame, exclusive people. All the Danava guys knew that, and they all had their own private circle of friends outside that.
Even Ida No, Portland’s desire, walked right up to me once after a Danava show at Ground Kontrol like she had been thinking about it, talking about UFO’s and woo-woo spiritual stuff that I was always down to get into. It was like she couldn’t talk with most people and she felt free. At my best, this is my primary social contribution.
Valentine, another hot local rock star from The Get Hustle ended up in my group voice class. She was a real cool person when I got to know her, but intimidating on stage and socially.
I have pretty much lost touch with everyone I’ve talked about. There is a little communication, but we drift and we change.
In the art scene, its about finding out who you really jibe with, otherwise it’s a lot of posing and having no meaningful relationships.
At the end of 2006, I believed everything was in its right place, until a vision would enter my mind that I could not ignore. The Salad House was not a cornerstone, but a stepping stone, and the real corner was going to turn at the start of 2007.
LCROSS Mission Radio Special on KBOO Radio – Archival Clip – Program at 04:05
On October 9, 2009, there was a propagandized NASA mission involving a “kinetic weapon” designed to eject enough plume from Earth’s Moon to be analyzed by a follower probe within minutes of impact. The hypothesis was that it could detect and measure water on the moon.
I learned about this mission through Jarrett Mitchell, who considered activism a kind of performance art. He chose this mission with that weird Portland ironic authenticity that was still charming back then. I met him during a tour of a T:BA Festival site in August for a different radio special. He passed out protest flyers headlined with, “DON’T BOMB THE MOON.” He used his talents for creative illustration as part of the art project.
Jarret brought songwriter Kaia Wilson. Kelly Slusher was my co-host and she brought on her friend and mentor at the time Alison Bradley. I also brought conspiracy theorist Alfred Webre by phone, just to throw everything off.
From the perspective of a producer, it was lightning in a bottle. From the standpoint of myself today, half of this show is ludicrous, and should be viewed as the reason that Portlandia was able to come into our city and trounce all over us.
There was an important question raised involving the status quo of peaceful use of outer space. There is a UN treaty and the idea is we don’t plan or execute any missions that could be used for violent purposes. I would say LCROSS legitimately could be viewed as a military exercise.
Beyond this genuine public interest question, we made little sense. Kelly says something about how this can effect the Earth’s tides. Then I said something about debris coming back to Earth. I legitimately wrote to NASA’s press department asking for comment about debris from the LCROSS mission. I cannot believe that I passed a full year of college astronomy with straight A’s. In fact, I consulted my instructor Bob Ewing about it and read his comments on the show.
Thankfully, I had the wherewithal to take a neutral position and have fun with it.
Kelly froze up at the beginning of the show and she couldn’t talk, even though she was co-host. I kind of forced her into that role because she inspired the show. When I showed her Jarret’s flyer and explained the mission, she cried, as if the moon was a delicate living being. As her Man, all I wanted to do was make her feel better, so I used my leverage at KBOO to squeeze a morning special in before the mission.
Morning drive listenership was estimated to be in the tens of thousands easily. I bet we had good ratings, but in broadcasting you never really know how many tuned in.
This program follows Democracy Now, and the audio file begins with Jeremy Scahill’s report. I leave in the whole context of the archival audio because it also includes a community calendar entry from Kelly, who joined me as a KBOO volunteer. We were a very close couple.
A few days later, she and I set our alarms to wake up around 4am to watch the mission. We envisioned a kind of moon landing experience, assuming live analog video of the moon would be visible. Not the case, as it would turn out, it was all sensors and computer generated images.
Despite this being one of the most highly propagandized videos of a lunar mission in decades, including a NASA commissioned rock song, a dedication to Walter Cronkite, and a publicized livestream of the mission, they did not have any video of the actual event.
We were able to broadcast men on the moon in 1969 but we can’t do it today.
I have a joke. If they had never faked the moon landing then nobody would have unrealistic expectations. Of course you can’t livestream from a flying rocket at the moon.
I have never been able to recover the original LCROSS mission livestream footage, but it was hilarious. Kelly and I were cracking up when we saw scientists playing for the cameras.
I’ll never forget what I saw though. Kelly saw it too.
One guy rose his hand for a high five, another guy let him hang. That guy, who let the dude hang, packed his briefcase in a hurry and stormed out of the room while everyone cheered on the success of the mission.
I hope a good citizen taped that livestream. If so, I hope they would email me with the video.
Finally, I will note that I was having my annual Portland cold, as the weather turns in late September, around when this show aired. You will hear my sinus but I push through it.
Although I am a little embarrassed of this program, it’s pretty entertaining, and as a host I do a fairly good job keeping the content moving.
