Hamlet Brings the Civil War to Oregon

While the brooding Prince of Denmark may seem to be an unlikely connector between Oregon and the Civil War, The Portland Actors Ensemble facilitate an unlikely mingling of historical figures at their June presentations of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark in the Lone Fir Cemetery. The Oregonian has an article that does an excellent job of tying these seemingly disparate players together.

This cemetery, located in the heart of southeast Portland, holds Civil War Veteran's remains and a Gettysburg Memorial, which was dedicated in 1939. Southerners don't own the rights to Civil War fascination! Little did I know that June 2012 marks the 150th anniversary of Oregon's connection to the Civil War (or the exact definition of  Sesquicentennial). General Howard fought in the Battle of Fair Oaks, Virginia, and he eventually settled in Portland, OR. Read more about Oregon/Civil War Connections here.

Furthermore, I've known from reading Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer, that Shakespeare was never far from Lincoln's mind, and our president had a personal affinity for the melancholy and humor of Hamlet. The author, Fred Kaplan writes

And, during his presidency, Claudius's soliloquy came frequently to mind, in reference to his own "offences," at least in moments in which he thought it possible the war might not be worth so much Sourthern and Northern blood. Was the war not also a form of self-murder, brother against brother, which, as a Southerner by birth, Lincoln could especially feel? 'What if this cursed hand / Were thicker than itself with brother's blood-- / Is there not rain enough . . . ?'

This ain't humid, y'all! 

Now, perfectly, fantastically enough, it started to rain just as our actor Hamlet spoke these lines. The irony was not lost on the northwest audience, smiling sheepishly at the sky. For the audience, the drips from the June sky were not as abnormal as the "humidity" commented on at the preamble of the play. It never ceases to amaze me when northwesterners think it's humid. Oh, ha, ha. Come on down to South Carolina in mid June and watch a play in a graveyard. The lightning bugs would be phenomenal, but so would the mosquitos, no-see-ums, and body-suffocating-all-encompassing-cloud of wet we refer to as "humidity."

One of the things I treasure about Portland, is the quality and quantity of outdoor Shakespeare each summer. And they're free. Portland's Parks (and cemeteries apparently) just lend themselves to outdoor theater, and Portland's people lend themselves to audiences. After months of gray, we take every opportunity to be out in the sunshine, warmth, lush, color and overall pleasantness that is Portland in the summer time. The living is, indeed, easy.

Towards the end of the play, as shadows inward crept, we felt the melancholic turmoil of Hamlet grow. The ensemble set up lights around the outdoor stage, and I inwardly noted the lack of bug-cloud surrounding the dusky lights. The comedic elements waned and the tragic waxed, as Hamlet shouted for Orphelia to "Get thee to a nunnery," and later scolded his mother/aunt for the impropriety and alacrity of her marriage to his uncle.

The play ended as we all knew it must, but Portland doesn't stay morose for long in the summer: exuberant shouts of Naked Bike Ride coincided with the audience's exeunt from the Graveyard. Well done, Portland, Well done.

Everyone Has Her Morning Ritual

My morning ritual begins with Morning Edition on OPB, Oregon's NPR station. I guess it's the closest thing I have to "broad and shallow," as mentioned in my last post The Future of News. For me, NPR is eerily spot on with news that's imminent and pertinent.

While we were pedaling around in the PNW philosophizing on the future of news, people in the deep SE were feeling the very present problems facing our consumption of news. How apropos. The story is "'A Morning Ritual': New Orleans Fights for Its Paper." Four newspaper in Alabama and Louisiana are laying off hundreds of reporters, and they are ceasing daily publication. In New Orleans, the Times-Picayune is moving to an online focus with only a 3 day print publication. The story ends with a man hoping that an entrepreneur can find a way to get us our daily news. Wow, has all of our technology brought us to this?

For the past few years, I have been teaching a college prep class to students, and one of their assignments was to choose 3 books from a theme and compare them. One of the themes was Hurricane Katrina. Students could select from several books, but the most relevant to this article concerns Chris Rose's 1 Dead in Attic. Chris Rose was a reporter for The Times-Picayune before, during and after Hurricane Katrina, and this book is a compilation of his published articles concerning the aftermath. For his journalism, he won a pulitzer. His commentary is raw, real and community focused. What would have been lost had this suspension of daily news and dearth of reporters happened during this crisis?

I was in Venice during the September 11th tragedy. This was when I started reading the New York Times online. I wanted to know what was going on in the city, written by people inhabiting and experiencing that place. I've continued to read it, because many of the stories are compelling and cover a broad range of topics.

My entire family in South Carolina reads The Post and Courier, and I enjoy reading it when I visit. It gives me a sense of place, not to mention the crossword. Speaking of ritual, give us our daily word puzzle. Because I no longer receive a daily paper, I no longer do the crossword. This is a great tragedy; however, playing Scrabble and Words With Friends on Facebook helps. Growing up, I can remember watching my mom drink coffee and do the crossword. As I got older (and smarter), I would occasionally offer a little help. Then one of my brothers would eventually look on and fill in some blank spots. Before the end of the day, the puzzle would be complete. Family bonding. When I'd visit my grandmother in college, I can remember doing the crossword with her. It breaks my heart to think of all those grandmothers and mothers and father and brothers and sisters in Alabama and New Orleans (where else?) not having a daily newspaper to do the crossword. Perhaps that's not the biggest implication, but at this moment it's the most poignant. I tried doing the crossword online. It's a farce.

Should a citizen of the U.S. necessarily have Internet access to be able to read the news? Is this fair to our older and poorer citizens? How can we support our journalists? I don't think a total breakdown into niche news markets is a wise direction to take. Newspapers give us marriages, deaths, crime, sports stats, and information on new ventures in our community.

Incidentally, I was at the monthly Friends of the Library meeting, and we were discussing the results of the levy vote in May. Yes it was successful. Yes it continued the 89 cents per $1000 assessed property value, but we still had to close the libraries on Mondays and reduce staff. If we hadn't continued the levy, most of the 18 branches would have had to close and the remaining ones would have reduced hours. Libraries and newspapers.

Necessity is the mother of invention, so I have every faith that we Americans will find a way. And so. All things must change. To every season. Nothing stays the same. Nothing endures but change. It's kind of exciting to imagine the future of news. I also think I'm pouring some of my morning coffee out to Ray Bradbury.

The Future of News Ride

Here in Portland, we have a little thing called Pedalpalooza, which happens each year. It lasts about 3 weeks, and most of the events are free. It's just another thing that keeps Portland weird. I have not fully participated in these events, but since I've been job hunting, I'm a little more in the know. I was hoping to use this event as a networking deal, but it didn't end up being that. It's less suited for my website, and more suited for this blog.

The ride was called "The Future of News," and it was hosted by Oregon Humanities (incidentally, I applied, unsuccessfully, for a job here). The main issue confronting the participants concerned the continuum between news that many people care a little about and news that a few people care very much about. In our age of modern media, we forget that people used to have to WAIT for it to come to them, and they didn't have much of an option about what it contained when it got there. However, the simplicity of a packet of pages in the form of newspapers, magazines and personal correspondence arriving once a day on my door step is pretty appealing.

We met at the Japanese American Historical Plaza down on the SW waterfront to begin the ride.  Several bike participants had already arrived, and I didn't have much time before we commenced. Annie Kaffen of Oregon Humanities hosted the ride, and Michael Anderson, editor of Portland Afoot, was our tour guide.

The ride consisted of 3-4 stops concerning the history of media in PDX, and we stuck to this schedule, other than being hustled off the Unitus Plaza. The first stop was the location of the first printing of The Oregonian on December 4, 1850. We discussed the expense of buying a printing press and challenges of disseminating the same news to a lot of people. The time arrived to pedal onwards to the current location of The Oregonian, which was established in 1950.

After being unceremoniously ushered away from the banking  plaza, we convened in the parking garage of The Oregonian. Apparently banks get twitchy when you start to occupy their space. I must concede, this was my first participation in the Occupy movement. I'm glad it didn't move beyond our constitutional right to gather and speak freely and our Portland right to pedal.

What did people care about in 1950? The age of mass production and consumerism: suburbs, schools, media. We pretty much cared about the same thing as in 1850, 1950, and 2012. Here they are in order of importance.
1. My family and friends.
2. My job
3. My hobbies, sports teams
4. My community
5. My civic government

Soon we pedaled over to Big Pink to discuss current changes in our consumption of media. Revenue for major publications is down by 50% in the last 5 years, yet our media options have increased exponentially. We now have Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Blogs, Willamette Week, Mercury, Bike PDX, OPB, just to name a few very specific ones. The small and passionate have replaced the big and shallow. What does that mean? How does it change the way we consume the news?

My biggest take-a-way from the discussion concerned my own personal news consumption. I pick and choose what I read. I'm pretty sure I read more than the average bear, but it's still filtered through my own choices. I choose to go to  NYtimes, The Onion, Jon Stewart, OPB, my friends' Facebook pages. I rarely choose to go elsewhere. My parents choose to go to the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh (gag me). The idea that I'm only consuming the deep and narrow bothers me. But I don't know what media outlet is going to provide the broad and shallow. The character in The Golden Notebook basically has a nervous breakdown because of this same issue! She was in London in 1950s. It's overwhelming the amount of information we have at our fingertips, and yet I feel inadequate about my breadth of knowledge. I guess it's time to stop contributing to this pile of words and go for a bike ride.

Boundary Lines

Because of its hard and fast geographical markers, Portland is an easy city to navigate. Burnside is the Mason-Dixon Line, dividing the north and south. The Willamette River cuts us up between east and west, giving the raison d'être for our namesake, "Bridgetown." Then there's our fifth wheel, north Portland and St. Johns. The fifth quadrant. I'm not even sure if north Portland and St. Johns are considered the same area.

Southerners can relate to boundary lines. After all don't we have our Mason Dixon and Mississippi? However, as I meet people outside of my southern stomping grounds, I realize that these famous geographical boundary lines are blurred. We can't actually decide what belongs where. Arkansas? Maryland? West Virginia? Texas? Florida? I mean, are they southern? Garden and Gun claims they are, including them in the "Southern Agenda" section.

The lines are blurred, certainly, but at the same time, we acknowledge cultural differences these boundary lines create. In my opinion, I think the greatest dividing line in Portland, a line similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald's "courtesy bay" in The Great Gatsby is the east-west divider. The further east one goes, the more conservative, "less hip" and provincial the atmosphere. Dingy strip malls take over, and the lack of urban planning is glaring. The taxes are probably lower. The western suburbs are the same, just in a more upscale and wealthy fashion. A strip mall by any other name . . . The closer we get to the intersection of Burnside and the Willamette, the closer we get to the mockumentary stereotypes in Portlandia. And yet, even in this small geographical location, the cultural divide is noticeable. The Willamette is our Courtesy Bay:

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western Hemisphere . . . They are not perfect ovals . . . but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.

I lived at West Egg, the -- well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them

Makes you want to read Gatsby again, doesn't it?  But here on the "wrong coast" as my mother would say, the east is the lesser of the two eggs. The West Hills overlook the city with a domineering and supercilious visage. As an outsider, I've never even met someone who lives in those hills, much less been invited to their homes. But this isn't a Portland thing. I found this to be true in Winston-Salem, Charlotte, Atlanta, and Charleston. This is true for Gatsby, too. The elegant, glittering, fashionable houses often tantalize us with their unreachable green lights.

I'm partial to the southeast in Portland. It's like the southeast in the U.S. The central-industrial eastside is funky, hip, and it has incorporated the railroad through its inner belly. Or, it has adapted to the tracks and forlorn whistles, understanding that the continent is vast and we're connected to it. No railroads ever go through swanky parts of cities and towns. I, for one, like to be in proximity to the rails. Since I've been paying my own rent/mortgage, I've always lived close enough to have to cross the RR on my running routes. It's liberating to think that I have the option to jump in one of those cars, On the Road Style. I haven't  yet, but my neighborhood is open to that possibility.

Watching the Trains in Raleigh

PDX Central East Side Tracks

Athens, GA tracks

I have abandoned SE in the PNW for too long! It's time to rejuvenate the connections between The South and The Northwest. I have too much to say for one blog post, so I'll start with Garden and Gun magazine. I had created the unofficial Facebook fan page for the magazine several years ago when it had to skip an issue because of the tanking economy. Since then, they have gotten digitized, have a fan page, include FB comments in the letters section, etc. However, my little fan page is still quite popular, with people asking to be added daily.

In their February/March 2012 edition, G&G published an article on "Best Southern Bars" and included a shout out to five bars around the country that "do Dixie right." Portland got mentioned with The Woodsman. While I very much enjoyed the atmosphere of this place, I don't think it gives off a distinctly southern vibe. I think they have some aspects that are southern, but I wouldn't even call it a Portland-Southern fusion. I personally think it's Portland doing Portland, and I give it big thumbs up. This lead me to consider spots in town that are definitively southern inspired. Portland definitely has a soft spot for southern tinged cultural influences, from music to food. The following are my top picks.

Screen Door 
If only Screen Door could have been on the other side of Burnside, it could have made it to the southeast. Shockingly, this establishment does not have a website, but their delectable menu is linked above. I hardly ever use it, because I always know I will be getting some version of their fried chicken. For brunch, I must opt for the Gin Fizz and cathead chicken and waffles. At $12, it seems like a steep price, but when you consider you can eat for the next 3 days, it's incredibly economical.

While this is down home food done upscale, it is done right. I used to think fancy dining and southern style were oxymorons, but apparently not.

Tennessee Red's

While many a Volunteer is turning in his grave, Tennessee Red's is located on 11th and Sherman. Since Grant and Lincoln streets are adjacent, I appreciate the intersection of irony. T.R. is definitely casual and southern, although they removed the fried okra from their menu, much to my chagrin. It's lost a bit of its luster for me, but I still enjoy getting a beverage and sitting outside on their picnic tables from time to time. It's just up the street from me, and their BBQ smoker can be sniffed from blocks away. You can select from several different sauces, and I enjoy the vinegar Memphis the best. I wish their mustard sauce was less sweet and more vinegar.





Pine State Biscuits
This was one of the first places I went in Portland, mainly because it was recommended by my friend from Charlotte who knew the owners. I was instructed to say hi from Cameron. They now have added a location on Alberta, but I have only ever been to the one on SE Belmont. On weekends, the line is always out the door and there's no where to sit inside. The biscuits are worth any inconvenience.


The Bye and Bye
I learned of this spot from one of the actual owners who happened to be my bartender from my past life in Athens, GA. I ran into him at Blitz Ladd while watching a UGA football game. Those types of coincidences are what this blog is all about. A certain type of Southerner moves to Portland on purpose, and it's always great to run into each other in our next lives.

This is a vegan place with strong drinks, often served in mason jars. Lots of peaches and bourbon happening here. This is a little slice of Athens hipster heaven up here in the ultimate hipster PNW. It's an informal, casual bar, but if you're in the mood for southern service this is not the place. However, if you want to mosey up to the bar and place your order, they're plenty friendly.