Yesterday's Gone

This feature by a kid at The Oregonian caught my eye because I've actually worked in a number of the establishments described in the article, and I've frequented nearly all of them at one time or another.

I could tell you dozens of stories about the owners, my co-workers and many of the patrons of these long-standing businesses.

Not all of it is pretty. Some of it could make you throw up your cocktail and tater tots and sober up in a heartbeat. Some of it might make you laugh.

Are you ready for my tales of drunkenness, madness, suicide and worker exploitation?  In other words, are you ready for the reality rather than the romanticism of Portland's bar culture?

I didn't think so. Therefore, I'll spare you.

BTW, the best bar in Portland from my perspective, because I worked there and because the owner paid a decent (livable) wage and implemented a profit-sharing incentive, didn't make this list.

To be fair, I've met some of the best people I know in bars, but I've met even more stupid people and greedy bastards who would rather rob you blind than acknowledge your humanity.


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Essay of the Day

Shortly after the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, George W. Bush told a Joint Session of Congress that “they” did it because “they hate our freedom.”  Everybody knew who “they” were.--AL

A must-read essay from one of our best political philosophers.

Levine provides the rope; Trump will likely use it, finally.

Here's the rest of the story. Go to the bar, log in, read until you're drunk with goodness.


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Ultimate Shithead

But the conservative Atlantic Magazine adores him, kinda.


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Headliners!

An incredible two-hitter by freshman sensation Kevin Abel leads Oregon State to the College World Series championship over Arkansas in Omaha!

This is OSU's third title, all of them achieved in head-coach Pat Casey's tenure at the Corvallis baseball factory.

The ESPN story.

They've done this in the rainy Pacific Northwest, folks, where baseballs are wet and slow and often covered in mud.  A minor miracle.

Congrats Beavs!!


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On the Retirement of Anthony Kennedy

Let freedom ring.


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Street Gang

Listen carefully to Hedges as he talks about the WP and Bezo's concoction called PropOrNot, a slanderous website that attempts to make every left-journalist in the USA a Russian propagandist at sites like CounterPunch, where I have published.

I assure you folks, particularly you ignoramuses, I am neither a Russian agent nor an anti-American propagandist; furthermore, I am well aware that elites from either U.S. Party would love to make me so.

So, as part of America's recently debated civil discourse, I also say, "fuck them."


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CWS: Tonight?

According to the weatherman Oregon State vs. Arkansas should be a College World Series go tonight (4 pm PT ESPN) in Omaha.

Monday night's first game was rained out.

Problem is, the weather can change fast in the Midwest, as anyone who has ever spent time there can attest.

I hope they get it in, and I'm rooting for OSU, naturally.

The Beavs won back-to-back titles in '06 and '07.  They're due again.


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Painting Glimpsed in a Gallery Window

Portland Art Museum sales gallery.


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Bikefest

In the South Park Blocks.


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Futbol Follies

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Gaggle of Goofs

Jackasses conducted by a moron.

It doesn't get any better than this, ladies and gentlemen. (Looks like a Klan meeting, doesn't it?)

#preachingtothechoir


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Dark Mistress

At sea in a growing storm.


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Shit Clown Plus

The "Wacko Bird" from Texas.


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Contemptible Cretin

Shit for brains.


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Vile Toad

One of many, unfortunately.

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Let's Dance

There are two versions of Bernie Sanders. There is the old Bernie Sanders, who mounted a quixotic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination as a democratic socialist who refused corporate cash and excoriated corporate Democrats. And there is the new Bernie Sanders, who dutifully plays by the party’s rules, courts billionaires, refused to speak out in support of the lawsuit brought against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for rigging the primaries against him and endorses Democratic candidates who espouse the economic and political positions he once denounced.--CH

Bernie Sanders as the unchosen one, or a revolution that wasn't.

The United States perverted budgetary priorities (epitomized by the heedless Obama-Trump nuclear weapons upgrade) reflect a moral collapse that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. warned the United States about in the famous antiwar speech he gave one year to the day before his assassination (or execution).  “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift,” King said, “is approaching spiritual death.”--PS

Hypocrisy at its apex.

Ah yes, the start of another week of treachery and greed in the good old USA.


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World Cup

OH NO!!!  Neymar is down on the pitch again writhing in pain!  Wait...is he hurt? 

Nah, he's just faking it again! Surprise!

Blah, blah, blah, the World Cup drones on live from the Evil Empire.

I wonder if Bill and Hillary are there?  They can't possibly be unaware of what kind of corrupt money lingers around for the taking...


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Don't Die Stupid

Like Saddam Hussein a decade and a half ago, Russia and its President Vladimir Putin have been repeatedly vilified in the Western media over the last five years, helping to mobilize popular support for the reemergence of a new Cold War.

Best-selling author Dan Talbot has called it in “one of the biggest fake news operations comparable to the yellow journalism promoted by the Hearst papers which sold military intervention in the Spanish-American War.”--JK

What's so funny about peace, love and understanding?

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a little tired of waiting for the Hitlerian nightmare that the corporate media promised us was coming back in 2016. Frankly, I’m beginning to suspect that all their apocalyptic pronouncements were just parts of some elaborate cocktease. I mean, here we are, a year and half into the reign of the Trumpian Reich, and, well, where are all the concentration camps, the SS units with their death’s head insignia, the Riefenstahlian parades and rallies? Trump hasn’t even banned the Democratic Party, or annexed Canada, or invaded Mexico, or made anybody wear color-coded armbands. If he doesn’t start Hitlering relatively soon, the oracles of the corporate media are going to have some serious explaining to do.--CJH

CJ Hopkins full on.

There's so much good stuff here you would be insane to ignore it, not to mention negligent!


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Fire!

Just in after two hours on the street because of another fire in my building teeming with morons and lunatics...

Tired and very pissed.







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RIP Ann Donovan

She helped revolutionize the women's game.  At 6' 8" she likely suffered from Marfan Syndrome.

Pete Maravich, a specimen, dropped dead at 40 on a basketball court.

Manute Bol died way too young, though it is said he may have been older than his listed 47 years.


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Bourdain in Gaza, Krauthammer in Fantasia

Krauthammer in '14.

Life in an outdoor prison.

Contextual history.


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Nothing to See

Haha, it's raining on Portland's biggest tourist invention, the long-running and long-past-its-prime Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade. It might have been a good idea at its inception decades ago, but am I a sourpuss to think it's spectacularly inane?

Am I the only person on the planet who doesn't love a parade?

You say I must hate kids, who love parades, until they're 10 and then wisely back off.  What explains the elders' love of this deadness? This sameness? This ritual display of civic blindness? This blandness...

I saw one once years ago, and that was enough for me. No mas, kaput, go away.

If any further evidence were necessary, as exhibition and proof of America's dullness and quite-dead cultural standing, this crappy Portland tradition is first and foremost.

People swear parades are harmless.  No, they're displays of ignorance, and ignorance is not harmless.

The Portland festival comes with a carnival on the waterfront where you can spend the money you don't have on junk rides, junk stuffed toy animals, junk food and actual junk if you're tweaking out.

Anyway, I love it when a parade is rained on, and hopefully the same thing will happen when Trump's military parade on Veterans' Day gets washed out by angry clouds and an even angrier citizenry--ha, like that'll ever happen.

Oh well...


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RIP, Bourdain

Had I not been deliberately transitioning out of the restaurant trade when this came out in 2000, I might have made it my bible.

I was homeless, a recently-fired chef, unemployable, not nearly as skilled as I believed, and mentally ill.

I never again wanted to see the interior of a commercial kitchen.

I was a good candidate for madness from the outset of my working life, but working in restaurants nearly finished me off.

Kitchen Confidential was a holy book, funny as hell, and as true a piece of writing as I've ever read.  I can say that because I recognized every damn situation and anecdote therein.

I took to it like an evangelical Christian takes to his favorite bible passages. I wasn't very big on the later TV shows, mainly because I'm not really a TV watcher, but the book got me.

Had I not read it, Bourdain's fate may have been my own in that long-ago nightmare.

The guy was absolutely gifted.  Sorry to see he didn't make it last a little longer.


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Fast Car

I watched this one being unloaded at the art museum yesterday.

The show opens on Jun. 16, runs through the summer.


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It's all gravy, bro...

“The United States of Amnesia.” That’s what Gore Vidal once called us. We remember what we find it convenient to remember and forget everything else. That forgetfulness especially applies to the history of others. How could their past, way back when, have any meaning for us today? Well, it just might. Take the European conflagration of 1914-1918, for example.

You may not have noticed. There’s no reason why you should have, fixated as we all are on the daily torrent of presidential tweets and the flood of mindless rejoinders they elicit. But let me note for the record that the centenary of the conflict once known as The Great War is well underway and before the present year ends will have concluded.--AB

Andrew Bracevich lights into the U.S.Pentagon brass and all their wily friends.


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On Du Bois

Du Bois would hardly fare better today. His radical critique of empire and capitalism would make him even more of a pariah in the academy and on the airwaves. The corporate state, assured they can keep us entranced with their electronic hallucinations and spectacles, along with the inane trivia and gossip masquerading as news, do not see him or other radical theorists as a threat. They orchestrated the post-literate society, the “enforced ignorance,” that perpetuates their power. We have his books. Read them while you still can.--CH

Hedges' lecture in NYC Friday.

History of the Left Forum.

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The Tonto Hotel

 
                                                                           

                                                                             











                     tonto hotel bar

             frosted longneck budweiser

                     posing before me



                    neon splashing on

         wet sidewalks cracked like mankind

                   a greyhound chugs by 



                  could have been on it

            but like the thought of more buds

                  marching up to me

                                                                   
          -- RP Thomas


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The Battery

Baseball is filled with whispers and secrets you and I cannot hear or know.


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Last Night

Pretty tasty. There's some pasta and ground beef in there somewhere.


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CL

My longest-running friend in Portland. Over forty years.  We used to tear this town apart, particularly our old neighborhood in Northwest.  You can't behave like we used to in that part of town anymore, since it was turned into a shopping mall.  You'd be told to leave the sector, the civilized minions would call the cops on you.  You'd be taken away in a straight jacket.  The moneyed interests would vote you into exile. You might get assassinated by a high-tech millionaire for not being politically correct.

Ah, the good old days. The place has had about a 60 pt. IQ drop in recent years, but there are more shiny new cars on the avenues than ever. Fry-cooks and adjunct professors can't afford to live there.  The best and brightest have scattered in the wind.

CL is an artist.


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Beer Garden

A favorite hideout near my pad.


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Neighbor's Door/Benign Neglect

My neighbor isn't big on the subsidized housing bureaucracy, and who can blame him?  It's a paper shuffle and a not-so-gentle reminder that they own you.  He just ignores it.  This is a prime example of what Frances Fox Piven called "Regulating the Poor" back in the early 70s.  It's only gotten worse as they inquire whether you've used toilet paper or your finger to wipe your ass after you've shit.

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American Alien

Whaaaaa...?

Another view. Pretty scary...Little bastard disappeared right after I snapped this.


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Separated at Birth?

David Price and Common.


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Tough Games

The University of Oregon has a long-standing curse on its athletic programs, despite the big Nike money that is its lifeboat.

Two NC games in football in the past eight years, both losses.

A Final Four and a sublime nose dive, in 2017.

A flame out in the Men's College World Series, Oregon's lone appearance since restarting baseball ten years ago. (What year: does it even matter?) What a slow road.

Golf?  Great individual play on occasion, but the team hasn't flourished.

T&F?  The women win trophies, the men are hurting lately, wherein a legacy thrower goes to Texas and wins Olympic Gold in Rio.  Oregon won the title in '15 and '16.  Can the team get back on track--so to speak--this year?

Now softball.  Oregon's women went into Okie City with the 1st seed overall, favored like Catherine the Great, and proceeded to get hammered and sent home crying. (There's crying in softball.)

O Woe!


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Poem

Jugadores

Me gusta
Dostoievski
y Saroyan, quien murió en bancarrota
Me he convertido en un degenerado
jugador; Solo me gustaría
podría escribir como ellos,
o al menos tan bien como Bukowski,
que rara vez perdió en los ponies--
el único escritor que admiro
quien jugó y escribió bien y
quien se ganaba la vida
y murió millonario,
escribir y apostar.


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Be Prepared

For future reference.  You never know when you might need to know.

Your weekend reading.  Don't slack off.


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