Catching up: Portland

OK, seated in a coffee shop in Grand Junction, CO; at last, an opportunity to Blog up with myself.

I got to Portland around 7:30 on Saturday night, after a beautiful drive over the pass. There was, of course, some shitty weather, but nothing at all like the last time (which had proved to be some of the hairiest driving I had ever had to do; that was in December, though, so I pretty much expected to have to do some stupid driving). Anyway, Jeff was out, but Emmy was home & greeted me outside with Dinah (who freaks out on people when they first arrive, but much less so if she can be brought outside to meet them). We loaded some stuff inside (I'd be staying for 3 days, so brought up a buncha crap, including my coffee machine - don't leave home without it!), then I joined Emmy outside while she smoked. I promptly picked up Dinah, which Emmy greeted with some concern; but Dinah let me get away with it, and I thus established that I was allowed to do that in my relationship to her (which is what I explained to Emmy).

I was starving, and wanted to listen to some music; so, we went down the street to the Jade Lounge, where a local band called Paschal Coeur was playing. In choosing a place to eat, we had listened to a bit of their music on myspace (cursed, cursed myspace! How useful thou art, betimes), and it had sounded cool.

The Jade Lounge proved to be likewise cool; lots of various finger foods, including: yam fries with wasabi-soy ketchup (delicious!), pretty damned good pork egg rolls, and chicken wings with some kind of ginger sauce on them. The music was good, and I felt myself instantly to be in Portland: a cool little bar, with a cool little band, some great food at almost 11 PM (all bars are required to have food until they close, so there are tons of good restaurants there. (Amusingly, when I spoke aloud the idea that, perhaps that had something to do with there not being a Denny's in downtown Portland (indeed, they get lots of business from late-night drunks in Flagstaff) I was immediately shouted down by those around me; it seems Portland residents are quite attached to their city's eschewal (word?) of all things corporate, and won't hear a word of you suggesting that other, pragmatic forces might also be at work). ((Super-parenthetical!))

Anyway, We had planned to head out for the Sassparilla show after that, but Jeff was getting back from his ludicrously insane rafting trip any moment, so we opted to wait for him (we didn't end up leaving the Jade Lounge until around midnight). He had gone to raft a river that was classified, technically, as unraftable; that is, tons of V+ rapids. He had recently joined the Oregon whitewater rafting team, and they do things like that. Just two of them in the boat, though, so rather intense. Apparently he and his companion would be the first to raft some portions of that river. He had thus had a very early day, and only agreed to go out to the show on the condition that we have some coffee ready for him. Naturally willing to oblige, I fired up the mokka, made coffee, which we drank, and then stayed up playing Chez Geek instead of going to the show. Great to see them, as always.

The next day proved to be rather mellow; woke up elevenish, made coffee, then went to the Pied Cow, where one can get tea, greek sampler platters, and hookahs - all of which we did, and sat outside on a glorious Portland Spring day. It was around 70, and awesome. We wandered back to the apartment around 4, and I headed out for the show at Vergnetti's.

Annie had just gotten the place up and running in the last few months; when I was there in December, it wasn't officially open yet. So it was cool to see the place. The front room was small, and had around a dozen tables ordered around a coffee cart; the back room would house the show, which had a bunch of chairs in front of a small are just beyond a broad archway which would serve as the stage. We were supposed to go on at 6, but I knew good and well that wasn't going to happen; I had been telling people 6:30, but even that seemed unlikely (as it happened, we got things off the ground a little after 7).

I had just brought two loads of stuff inside the place when Wendy Cipolaro walked up; we hadn't seen each other in 8 years, and I had just remembered she was in Portland before I left Flagstaff. Somehow, we had kept in touch, and so I had told her about the gig, as I had many other people from the semi-distant past who I knew lived in Portland; she was the only one who showed up. Actually, that's a pretty expectable ratio; you tell all kinds of people that you'll be in town on tour, and one or two will actually make an appearance. Well, Lynsi, Dave, Emmy, and Jeff would all be there, as well as two friends of Dave and Lynsi who were visiting; but that almost doesn't count, since Lynsi and Dave (or Mimsy and Dimsy, as I started calling them while I was there) had just left Flagstaff a month before, and I was staying with Emmy and Jeff.

Wendy had been in Portland for a couple years; she had spent time in the Peace Corp, in Bangladesh, and a few years in Michigan or Minnesota or Wisconson (not having been to any of those three states, I somehow can't keep them straight in my head when somebody says they're from or have lived in one of them; a notable exception is Buzz Nichols, who I know to live in Michingan). We talked about what a trip it was to see Dom Flemons' face and name in all sorts of prominent places.

There was a decent little crowd of folks between the three of us. Annie went on first, and I joined her onstage playing flute on a couple of tunes; then John played, and impressed everyone with his display of dexterity - being a one-man band is a rather impressive thing, and rightly so. He even played Pile of Junk, which has always been one of my favorites of his songs. Then we took a break and I played, with Annie joining me at the end of "I Don't Care What You Say" for a ten-minute long improvised back-and-forth about boobs. It may well have gone on for too long, but it was fun, and people were laughing throughout. John played again to wrap up the night.

I felt really loose to be playing with such a group of people who knew me so well sitting there; and found them all laughing at lines in songs I had always found to be amusing to me, but had rarely gotten laughs for at other times. Strange how you can have that interpretation for your own lyrics, but not expect other people to pick up on it; they definitely proved me wrong, in a pretty cool way, actually. A lot of fun, as I told stories and whatnot, and directed various lyrics at various people there. It was a great time, and just what I wanted out of a show in Portland.

The next day was also mellow, and included a visit to Heart, a coffee shop right down the street from Jeff and Emmy's that served the fabled siphon coffee for a mere $6 per cup. I would never buy such nonsense ordinarily, and Emmy was appalled that I would even consider buying it, and (as it happened, completely correctly) divined that it wouldn't be my style of coffee at all. But I was feeling touristy, and was pretty curious about the device itself - what, indeed, could possibly justify anyone's spending $6 on a cup of coffee? I had to find out what the whole damned deal was about.

The device has a globe that gets filled with water in the bottom, and a carafe that seals to the top of that with coffee in between. The place sticks the globe over a $20,000 halogen lamp heating system, which boils the water, and forces it up through a glass tube that extends down through the water, not unlike my mokka; but after it has brewed, it is allowed to cool, which sucks the water back down through the coffee again, and into the lower globe (since a seal is maintained, once the steam condenses and contracts once again, it has no place to go but back into the lower globe). Quite a fascinating process; the device itself can be bought for $99, or you can drop $6 a pot at the cafe. The coffee was good; but I like my coffee to be completely opaque with superfine coffee sediment, and this stuff was (while pretty strong) also rather mild, a few steps toward tea in effect. Not my speed; but, i made a complete idiot of myself, and embarassed Emmy, Jeff, and their friend Will, by filming the whole process, and asking the barista lost of silly questions about how it all worked. He played along, pretty unironically and without getting visibly annoyed with me; he seemed bemused more than anything else, and perhaps thought I was with some kind of indie tv show he hadn't heard of, and so felt obliged to play along with my filming and questioning. These days you never know when your most unsympathetic, irritated and short-tempered incident might be caught on film as your defining moment.

Jeff had to go to work after that, and I had to finish stuff for the Song Walk; so we went back to the apartment, and I sank my head into the computer for an hour or so to do some emailing. Then Emmy and I went off to Powell's, the mecca of mecca's for used books. Every time I go there I find things I haven't thought about in forever, and end up spending tons of dough on books I will lovingly read over the next weeks and months. As it happened, this time I dropped about a hunnert, and emerged with a paper sack full of science fiction, vonnegut, hesse, and various others.

We went into the rare books room, where the most modestly priced specimen cost more than my car; the first things you see when you walk in are these giant photography books, all of which conicide in having pictures of naked ladies somewhere within, in large format and for all the world to see. Very funny; come see rare, giant photos of nekkid wimmin! I was amused. They also have a first english edition of the Little Prince, which I think was signed, for a mere nine thousand. More than all of my possessions put together in a pile and sold at their best price, I'd say.

We left Powell's after an hour and a half of used book orgiastics, and stopped in at Guardian Games, a local gaming store. I had asked the guy at Powell's about the expansions for Chez Geek, and he had directed me there. It proved to be an enormous place, with half the room dedicated to tables where the geeky could gather and game. Emmy was a bit overwhelmed, never having seen people waving their geek flag high with such abandon before. I was almost persuaded to buy Chez Cthulhu, which was a modification of Chez Geek to somehow involve the Cthulhu Mythos; but I restrained myself, and only bought the first expansion to Chez Geek.

With that, we headed out for dinner at the Screen Door, an amazing soul food restaurant that usually had a line out the door, but which was mercifully slow owing to the basketball game happening between Portland and Phoenix (Emmy and Jeff's friend Will had been pushed by some random dude for wearing a Phoenix Suns hat; even in the multiculturally hip, independently-minded metropolis of Portland, you have idiotic sports zombies). So we got a table, and got served, remarkably quickly, and had a fine time. Wendy and John joined us, John a bit later as he had to drive from whatever part of the bumblefuck fringe of Portland he had just moved to. John has always enjoyed living in the bumblefuck fringe of wherever; in Flagstaff, he lived in what was basically a cabin on the edge of town, heated via woodstove, and occasional host to various deadbeat songwriting friends of his (e.g. me a time or two).

And that'll do for now; I have some stories to tell about Boise and Moab, as well, but am pretty exhausted from Blogging, and so must pause. Tonight at The Ale House, here in grand Grand Junction, Colorado.