Daily Miltonian

You could go see the Yacht and the Thermals for free, tonight, at Backspace. You are either:

A.) So excited OMG you are sooo gonna dance your a$$ off! You love energy! Life is fun.

B.) Afraid of crowds. Friday night is always, without fail: bottle of pinot, bubble bath, candles, Mozart, Keats, you.

C.) Dude that’s not music and you hate kids (and attractive people in particular).

D.) Le sigh, saw the Thermals play in a basement back when North Portland was scary and everyone else lived in Kentucky.

Either way, far be it from us to find pain in one band’s gain, here’s the Thermals brand new video which, we will say this much, features an early autumnal Portland 2007 (dubbed by us as “Fall 2″) which looks as sweet as it did two months ago.

Also an early heads up about the Rom/Bill Mantlo benefit that’s going to be going down at Floating World Comics on December 6th. Two of your illustrious Miltonian hosts write for local, Portland newspapers. Neither remembered to pitch this. One of them in particular — the one that remembers getting a Rom as his first actually cool (read: non-Mickey Mouse) toy back in either 1979 or 1980 (appoximately) and his first cool (read: non-Archie) comic book probably around 1982.

Everything about this show is beautiful and noble, righteous and good, which is why this week, here at the Miltonian, is Rom Week. This is just the beginning.

Here’s a short, cool mention of the show at Comics Reporter, a blog about comics that we like. Check it.

Also! If you’re effeminate and continental, or manly and moneyed, or elegant in your womanliness, remember: Davis Cup tomorrow. Here. In Portland. World Class Tennis! Memorial Coloseum!

Tickets are so ridiculously sold you’d have to bribe the pope for an after-tea report, but that’s no reason not to have yourself some strawberries and cream and head to your favorite tennis lounge with a tee vee, and root root root for the home goddamn team, because it’s James Bond time, U.S. v. the Russian hordes–who are quite polite, we’ve seen them, we know, hard players, hard drivers, low flat spin, but they can’t volley for shit. What ever happened to conversation, guys? Even as a metaphor? What’s the capital of Texas, Russky?

Yeah…. I thought so.

Anyway, the tennis crowd’s 60% out of towners (fact!), and probably congenitally loaded, so this is your chance to loiter stylishly near the event and shine on with some fine young debutante or entitled-class gentleman far too classy to wear tennis whites after Labor Day. Who will, of course, eventually do you like they did poor Scarlett Johansson before knocking up some pedigreed mouse of a girl and dying of a slow smother.

Play on, America.

Attention residents of Daily Miltonian East: there’s an interesting interview with Robby Redcheeks (NJ, Philly, Hardcore, 90’s) here. Now, no one’s ever gonna mistake good old Robby for Proust, but he certainly nails a few key things about a truly special time in Pre-Internet American Youth History — a history that, without a few proud elephants walking around with this stuff in their heads, would become almost certainly completely buried by Time. Little documentation exists: a rumored VHS video of summer exploits in the hands of who knows, some fugitive flyers buried in a closet somewhere in New Jersey, a stray issue of Sandbox fanzine lost in Bensalem, a Crud demo stuffed in some forgotten shoebox, and ourselves, our collective memories.

Not to put too fine a point on it [editor: is that even possible to write without this song getting stuck in your head?], but the post-game analysis of undocumented history in the hyperaware age of Let’s Digitally Record Exististence Itself begs the question of, well, just what the fuck is history, anyway? “The more we try to explain sensibly these phenomena of history,” Tolstoy wrote, “the more senseless and incomprehensible they become for us.” Only by admitting the most infintesimal units for observation “can we hope to comprehend the laws of history.”

History began as a Greek philosopher’s pipe dream and ended as an entry on your blog; in between, there was Robby Redcheeks, Sean McCabe, and Ocean City, New Jersey. In short: there was Kano Summer.

Fort Saint Davids wasn’t a part of that, but your current narrator was at the circumference of it. There I was, a young man of only sixteen years, sitting on the bank of an otherwise placid lake, watching ripples of hitherto unknown proportions lap against the mud where I sat, thinking to myself: holy shit something big just went by. Except it wasn’t a lake, it was an ocean. “Beneath the paving stones, the beach…”, some crazy kid in Paris wrote on an impossibly bright afternoon in May, 1968. This is the shit he was talking about.

End Part One.

You’re going to watch Lech Majewski.

Because listen, I understand, we all like stories, and we maybe were all a little put out by Peter Greenaway’s grand high pronouncements on the film’s sensual surface and the need to divorce the moving image from literature to create a pure movement of abstraction, the form’s determination and continual redetermination by its technology, &c., &c., &c. This before making movies about wives doing the cook to eat their husbands.

And it’s not as if Stan Brakhage didn’t take care of all that noise with a little more honesty to begin with.

And whoo, boy, is that abstract. Miltonians, we’re telling you: we can feel our skin rejecting our eyes, our noses rejecting our brains on that stuff. Even his name does it for us, those shades of breakage and bric-a-brac and bricolage. Stan! Stan! Is that you, you old moneymaker?

But you’re going to watch Lech Majewski.

Our own Whitsell Auditorium’s been doing a retrospective of him and it’s almost over, and it’s one of those things where the image rips the story out of your own heart, OK? That post-Tarkovsky business where the still frame floods the back of the movie’s brain with water. Like if Jim Jarmusch grew up in a place so miserable and improvised that style was a thing of desperation, not disaffection.

DOES IT EXPLOIT THE FILM’S SENSUAL SURFACE? you ask? Get over it. Movies don’t depict sex: they are sex, and this is good sex, with foreign movement and slow dawning surprises and a life it hurts you to know.

You got your Garden of Earthly Delights tonight, Wednesday, November 28, 7pm at the Whitsell (pictures above and up top), and his maybe-masterpiece Angelus Friday, November 30, 8:45pm at the Whitsell (picture down below), and then you’re out of luck. You’re stuck with DVD, which is like watching a porn instead of having sex, on purpose.

Which is lazy and self-obsessed, in my opinion.

Anyway, in the first movie you’re dying obsessed with 16th-century, multitasking bawd, in the second, you’re sacrificing a virgin to end WWII and save life as we don’t know it. You would do either, given the choice. You will do either.  

You will watch Lech Majewski even though he made Basquiat. Really.

OK, bye.

Sometimes late, when things are real.

That’s right boys and girls: Sweet Saturdays! You heard the starting gun on Thursday, enjoyed the stuffing, relished the turkey, went crazy on the gravy and then, oh yeah that’s right, then you had the pie (You: pecan. Us: pumpkin). Your Source For Valid Opinions and Inspiring Quotes, aka your Daily Miltonian, hereby declares every Saturday between Thanksgiving and New Years to be…Sweet Saturday!

Scheduled Sweet Things You’ll Consume Today (that is, on Sweet Saturday):

-1 Glazed Donut from Voodoo Donuts, with a coffee — early Sweet Saturday, Trimet buses and morning traffic, newspaper stuffed under arm, focussed on the day ahead.

-1 Chocolate w./vanilla buttercream cupcake from St. Cupcake — now well into SS afternoon, pleasant and without direction, under steel-blue skies with a minimum of clouds.

-1 Hot Chocolate from the cafe of your choice — SS brisk late Autumn azure twilight, strolling with purpose along the leaf-strewn Park Blocks, past the ominous Teddy Roosevelt monument, wearing the warm scarf of your choice.

Yes of course it’s OK to indulge — you’ve been walking all day with that crazy gang of friends of yours, or else you’re all alone, with only thoughts of the Daily Miltonian to keep you company. That’s right, make no mistake: we’re there for you!

Daily Miltonian: Your Thoughts Are Always With Us

Where You Will Go And What You Will Do, In Portland, Tonight:

I mean, all your friends are already there, so part of you is kind of realizing that yes, you are pretty much forced to go see Menomena once again.

Those looking to a.) stay downtown and b.) fall asleep, might do worse than check out the latest Friend of the Microphones with an Acoustic Guitar Who Plays Music That Sounds Just Like the Microphones Even Though We Are So Sick Of the Microphones Yeah Their Early Stuff Was Magic But It’s Just Too Self Indulgent At This Point It’s Like It’s Written Just For the Other Friends of The Microphones Who Sound Like the Microphones (but) Not Written For Us. Or wait it’s not even the Microphones any more it’s like, um, called Mount Hood or something like that, who knows cares. At Valentine’s with the Watery Graves, ZZZzzzz. Wait, hold on, what’s that?

Renee the Secretary: You never said who the band was.

FSD: Yeah, well, uh…

RTS: You don’t know their name do you.

FSD: That’s what the intern is for. Intern!

Bobby the Intern: The band is named Woelv. They’re on K Records. I mean she is on K Records.

FSD: And? Does she sound like the Microphones? I mean Mt. Adams?

BTI: Not really. Dude just produced her record. It sounds more like CocoRosie and it’s all sung in French.

FSD: Dear Lord!

Legend of Street Dog: Awhooooooooooooooooo!

RTS: She’s from Canada.

FSD: Canada! What in the name of–?!

LSD: Awhooooooooooooooooo!

RTS: Yeah, well…

FSD: Canadaaaaaaaa!

LSD: Awhooooooooooooooooo!

Julio the Owl: Hooo hooo hooooo.

FSD: Canada.

Dear Thanksgiving (preferably deep-fried) turkey consuming public: we, your Daily Miltonians, salute you. We salute your mashed potatoes, your casserole, your screaming children, your pathetic Jets, your sinister Cowboys. We salute a lifetime of calamity and obligation, compressed into one single day and cheeseclothed over with sentiment (we do, we love it). We only half-heartedly salute cranberries. We salute pumpkin pie made from yellow squash. We salute your gravy but we only salute the most basic of stuffings. We salute Stove Top, for example. We do not, however, salute “fancy” type stuffing that includes, say, dear God raisins. We salute vegetarians, but never, ever, will you find us saluting a Tofurky. Sorry, Tofurky. Sorry Turducken.

Wait hold on — see, let us disclose something here: this is the first ever Miltonian post written by the entire Miltonian staff. While you gather round the table, we gather round the Cray-1 Supercomputer.

You should feel doubly privileged on this, the most American of holidays. The picture above is the first known photograph of the FSD Happy Valley NW adjunct office. We’re happy here, and not just because of all the free booze and turkey. Anyway, it was Renee the Secretary who suggested Turducken. Which is–Renee?

Renee: Turducken is a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey.

FSD: That sounds fucking insane.

Renee: It’s tasty.

There you have it. Welcome to America, you shifty Canadian. We don’t trust you.

Theater just ain’t what it used to be. It’s not 1981 anymore. You can’t just slather yourself in olive oil, slip into a tighter-than-skin cat suit and call it art. Matter of fact, let’s be honest here: you can’t even dress up like a mink.

Fort Saint Davids mourns today the loss of one of our favorite pieces of improvisational street theater. Time was, performances were every Saturday at 1pm, outside Schumacher Furs on SW 8th and Morrison.

Sometimes you merely got your standard floorshow, familiar from over 40 years of made-for-TV dress rehearsals: PETA ladies naked in cages, facepaint, slogans, chants, sickly vegans, pictures of skinned dogs or cats. The usual.

But sometimes, well: sometimes Schumacher hired people to protest the protesters, placed burly security out front (who flirted with the protesters), stood out there and yelled, brandished a stuffed bobcat, or just plain got weird.

Well, Miltonians, sad to say, their epic tale of crossed stars and each being unhappy in its own way has passed us by. We’re not saying this is Tom Stoppard material, exactly. Kushner, maybe. Surely as complex and moving, at least, as your average Lloyd Webber musical (to which this entry, with all our Miltonian heart, is dedicated.)

But: the store’s closed, and yesterday Mr. Schumacher’s lawsuit against the protesters got tossed out of court. Something about the First Amendment.

Poor sad guy. Portland theater will never be the same.

You heard it here first. Just this morning, Bruce added Portland to his 2007-2008 tour with the E Street Band. March 28th, Rose Garden.

Reason to Believe.

This is the part where we’re supposed to say something about Italian Spiderman, but words seem pretty useless right about now. The Internet, for the most part, fails: even our generally trustworthy know-it-all neighbors over at Wikipedia had no idea what we were talking about. We figured we’d put a picture up in lieu of words (as we said, they fail), but Google Image Search has apparently never even heard of Italian Spiderman. It’s a strange day when the Internet can’t tell you about what you just found on the Internet, and since we’re your Favorite Internet Location we’ll be the first to apologize for being Seriously Puzzled. But what the hell, go ahead, faithful Miltonian, click the above Youtube video. Oh yeah, that’s right: Italian Spiderman.

Sometimes this stuff just falls from the sky. We are, we’ll admit, not immune.

Because unlike the Oregonian, our anointed paper of record, Fort St. Davids was not for a moment fooled into believing that this is a picture of a cancerous sea lion.

Any more than we, say, we mistook declining rates of meth use for an “epidemic.” Or, like, misfired with shotgun rifle and accidentally punched a ballot for George W. Bush . Twice.

But we understand. Anybody makes mistakes. And besides, Gus seems like an awesome sea lion.

 [Edit: And you'll note, as we did, if you follow the link, that "Today's picture" has been changed. This is because "Today" has changed, not because Gus has been reclassified. Oh, the perils of the simple present indicative--we all get suckered by it.]