The Carrie Miller Projects

Carrie Miller was, and still is, a character from my second novel, True Jersey: Volume One.  Among many other things she’s an artist who tends to find herself writing more art proposals than actually making art.  This situation is further compounded by the fact that her proposals are often for things that tend to be impossible to make, or just not feasible in the eyes of potential art grant writers.  As the writing of True Jersey: Volume Two (tentatively entitled Driveway to Driveway) is indefinitely on hold as I work on my current project The New American Novel (and also let’s face it it’s hard getting up the motivation to write a sequel to your own still-unpublished novel), I will offer here, on occasion, some of Carrie’s latest proposals.  The Daily Miltonian encourages any artist worth their salt to go through and make these projects a reality.  We only ask that you mention Carrie Miller’s name, as well as your friends from the Daily Miltonian.

Gimme Shelter

A mediation on the use and/or misuse of urban “space” in art galleries, Gimme Shelter is a completely “public” art show (“for the public by the public”) without security or even a receptionist.  Instead, the galleries doors will be open 24 hours a day for the duration of the exhibit for open artistic use.  Because there will be no “definition” of what constitutes an “artist”, and there will be no pressure or forthright encouragement for the “artist” to actually “make art”, it is my supposition that the “Open Gallery” will find itself instead a de facto shelter for the local homeless, who will not in any way be dissuaded from taking shelter in the gallery for the duration of the exhibit.

Radroach!

As a part of the “Grafreeti” series of Free and Legal graffiti art projects (i.e. “dust tags” by finger on dirty windows, art on discarded objects/paper plates/furniture), Radroach! takes the idea even further by creating a completely legal form of public art that can actually invade the viewer’s home, thus releasing art from the confines of its “controlled” gallery milieu and returning it to a place where it can once again shock and surprise.  “Grafreeti” art in the form of sticker tags will be applied to the back of local urban cockroaches.  The viewer will be confronted by an ACTUAL form of street art, as the art is transported via roach down legitimate city streets and into places where art is rarely found, i.e. sewers and other forms of city infrastructure.  The luckiest of viewers will be able to find the art inside their home as the roaches can be found invading cupboards, bathrooms, and beds.  Participants are encouraged to leave out crumbs and other enticing forms of food to attract the art into their homes, a much more honest kind of transaction and transport than dealing with the traditional art dealer and gallery.

iPhotos

iPhotos is a series of digitally projected photo albums culled from the iPhoto files found on the hard drives of ten (10) randomly selected owners of Apple Macintosh laptop owners.  Viewers are encouraged to explore the digital photograph albums using the iPhoto program found on the laptops installed within the exhibit, and the impressions they take away from the full experience of these ten completely unconnected sets are theirs and theirs only.

A Tale of Two Reviews

Why are there two reviews to the new Jonathan Lethem book in the New York Times?  The first one, written by Michiko Kakutani, is the meanest thing you’ll read all week, with sentiments like “nothing but a lot of pompous hot air,” “more like whimsical embroiderings than genuinely interesting or illuminating inventions,” “a strangely detached and lackadaisical production that sorely tries the reader’s patience,” and it’s concluded by calling it a “lame and unsatisfying novel.”

Fuggin’ ouch, right?

So I’m listening to the New York Times Book Review podcast (while doing the dishes, naturally) and Lethem is on there and the guy is like dude you have to feel good right?  All that hard work and the Times gives you a cover story review that calls it a masterpiece.  And Lethem is like oh man it’s so good for me and more importantly my publisher now they have nice quotes to put on the book et cetera.  Meanwhile, what?

But here’s the other review, in case you don’t believe me.  I understand that one is the Book of the Times and the other is the Book Review, but still, can you really do that?  Does it happen more often than I think it does?  I’m going to the store to buy books and I check the review and two weeks ago there’s the one mean one so I skip the book then two weeks later there’s the nice one but what if my budget is up and I bought something else?  Boy I bet this pisses publishers off.  But it confuses me because it brings up this idea — do newspapers get more than one word on something?  I mean I guess they do, right, they’re democratic newspapers with as much ed as there is op.  But when it comes to reviews, mighty papers always seem to hold this hammer that either dooms or blesses.  You know, the old story about the restaurant that’s been open barely a month before the damning Times review that forces it to close a month later.

What if they had run a second review that raved about the place?

What do you think?  Should papers have their one mighty opinion you can trust or should they have multiple perspectives from which you can choose from?  Do you like seeing all those different sides or do you just want a single authority that you can trust?

Should the Miltonian publish a few reviews of this book as well?  Here’s one by our former staff writer Matthew Korfhage!

The Weird Science of Post-Narrative

My life-long distrust of neatly organized narratives and an attending lack of interest in — and complete inability to construct — a “traditional” story, it seems to me on this beautiful October morning here in the Pacific Northwest, stems (I believe) from my own personal slipshod and haphazard manner of ingesting the relentless deluge of Pop Media that came at me from all sides during the entirety of my Nineteen-Eighties childhood.

To put it simply, the other day I realized that for a disproportionate number of the Eighties films I thought I knew through and through (Weird Science, Trading Places, Airplane, off the top of my head) I would discover upon re-watching them as an adult, that there were huge chunks of said films that I actually had not seen.  There are a number of suspect factors, and most are due to the impositions of a world outside the control of a child and the conditional format of real-time televised broadcasting.  Heavy editing for network television is high on the list, but mostly I believe it’s the jump in and out nature of Childhood Television Viewing in a world controlled for the most part by adults and peers in an era of unmediated media.   School is out, you get home, you do some chores (probably just feed the cat or let out the dog), you turn on the TV, the Karate Kid is on.  You’re not pressing play, there’s no download: whatever is happening in the film now is what you are seeing right now.  Anything can prevent you from watching the films penultimate showdown and ultimate conclusion: homework, a phonecall, a friend knocking at the door, dinner.  When you return to the television set, the film has long been over.  A complete childhood of this kind of fragmented viewing has molded and informed my own fractured sense of narrative, as well as the sense of overlapping and conflicting narratives arising from self-imposed interruptions  in the form of playing a Gameboy game while the television is on, flipping channels from Thundercats to G.I. Joe, or reading a comic featuring “Cap’n'Crunch” on a cereal box while eating cereal and paging through an X-Men comic and an issue of Nintendo Power while Scooby-Doo solves mysteries on the television set other room while a parent packs a lunch nearby whilst jamming out to WMMR’s “The Morning Zoo.”

In true to the essence of Post-Narrative and the discussion thereof,  this essay has no proper conclusion.

May I Sing With Me

Hark, Miltonians, we hail thee on this fine October morning.  The streets are damp, the leaves are bright, and the air is moist.  We have arrived.

ITEMS for Mid-October:

- HBO’s Jonathan Ames-penned Bored to Death continues at it’s…I guess we’ll say pace.  We’re watching it.  We like it most of the time.  We don’t hate it.  But what’s missing?  It’s something so subtle it’s like — the editing is off or something.  The lines are good, the actors say them well, and then, huh, it’s like a beat got dropped somewhere.  It doesn’t snap.  You know what I mean?  Schwartz used to say that about a good story, he’d snap his fingers a few times and say it has that. I guess that’s the problem, if we’re even going to consider it a problem (and we’re still not sure.)  It doesn’t have that.

- The Game of the Year Edition of Fallout 3 was released this week and we picked up a copy at the Gamestop in Pioneer Square.  We have a few options for getting games in our life — Amazon usually saves a few bucks but we don’t like waiting and we like going to stores and walking through doors and seeing things on shelves and selecting thing that we want and taking it to the counter and paying the nice lady or gentleman and then taking the thing back home with us and staring at it while we ride the MAX and being very excited for it and then finally letting ourselves into our homes and RUNNING up the stairs and throwing ourselves down on the bed with our shiny new thing, tearing off its plastic wrapper, and feeling aw man really good. Our other options are the PSU Campus Gamestop (kinda scenic in a college scene kinda way) and Fred Meyer’s — which is where we get our groceries but we love that we could go there and buy our organic groceries and our flatscreen TV and our Rogue Ales and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (on vinyl!) and our Mario ALL AT ONCE if we wanted to.  Anyhow we chose Pioneer Square because a.) it’s practically a mall and we love malls especially malls with escalators and b.) it was close to the little Russian mini-diner that we just discovered that had one little counter and one big Russian man behind it and 3 (Russian?) cops at a little table in the back and they served Lavatza coffee.  We bought one, in a “to-go” cup, with a yellow banana.  One scalding sip of Lavatza and we said “We deserve the new version of Fallout 3.” (It’s new because it has all of the downloadable extra content that has been coming out for the last year.  It’s got Alaska, and a boardwalk, and a spaceship, among other stuff).  So anyhow, we walked in through the glass doors, up the escalator, and then up the OTHER escalator (there’s so many escalators in this place) and then we bought the game.  Game safely in our backpack, we sipped the rest of our Lavatza out on chill October street and headed up the street to the carts, where we tried a different Vietnamese cart than our usual.  The lady was really glad to see us and her vibe was right on so we just said “Make us whatever your favorite thing is, with tofu!”  We took that home and ate it and boy were we glad.  Red peppers, onions, brown rice, broccolli, tasty tofu, mystery veggies (who knows!) and a curry sauce to die for.  For costing a mere six bucks we split this massive amount of perfect food into two different meals and were satisfied both times.  Next time you’re in town, we’ll take you there and you’ll be glad we did.

As for the game, so far, we really like it!

Ten Perfect Films

1. Dog Day Afternoon

2. Two-Lane Blacktop

3. The Third Man

4. Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia

5. Days of Heaven

6. Husbands

7. The Breakfast Club

8. The Empire Strikes Back

9. Network

10. The Passenger

Further Suggestions

Finding The Perfect One Word Description of Your Morning Bikeride in October

We have two: crisp and brisk.  What are yours?

The Third Episode of the Fort Saint Davids Podcast

It’s available now, only on iTunes, for the very low price of free.  It’s a long one too, about a half hour of content.  The scoop: Erik Bader reads the first full chapter of The Pilot and the Panda.  Put your digital copy on the MP3 player of your choice — or just listen with leisure from the convenience of your home computer — and dig that prose!

Gandys Beach, NJ

We made this post exactly a year ago, and all the sentiments contained therein hold true today one year later.  Also: we’re planning on heading that way, this time in early November.  We never did make it to Gandys Beach that Autumn — we got lost in the Pine Barrens, chased by the military off of Ft. Dix, our shoes creaked the boardwalk of a late October Ocean City, and we got to see Molly the Cat in her new home in Wilmington.  Will we make it to GB this time?  Probably not.  What are the odds that us, or you, or anyone you know, will make it through a life without ever once setting foot in the brine-rich salty air and heavy-barnacled environs of Gandys Beach, New Jersey?  High to definite.  But if you can, do.  Because if you don’t, you won’t, and if no one ever does, then no one ever will.

Starcraft

It’s a PC game (and a Mac game).  It takes place in space.  It’s over ten years old.  And it’s still really good.  It was and still is considered a major pioneer in the RTS category.  That means “real time strategy.”  Orders, cap’n?  I read you.

Walking Up Vista to Council Crest Then Discovering The  Marquam Trail Then Getting Kind of Really Lost Then Walking Up Steep Dusty Cliff-Like Hills With Breathtaking Distant Cityviews Through The Trees And Crossing Wooden Bridges to OSHU Then Sitting At a Weird Bus Stop Across From a Convenience Store That Feels (And Sorta Is) Like it’s All On Top of the World Then Taking The 8 Bus to the PSU Campus Then Walking Home in the Urban Autumn Dark

Is there anything else we can say about this?  It’s a fern-gully dream, with D&D /Zelda style wooden walkways outta nowhere, steps in the forest, wildlife that cheeps and chimes, woodpeckers, and a feeling of Deep Magic.  Try it sometime, and don’t forget to take the 8 Bus down the steep windy hills right as the pre-dusk twilight has gone all peach/salmon all over everything.  Frickin’ gorgeous, meng.

The Miltonian Suggests

We always liked reading these and thought: why didn’t we come up with that idea?  But honestly it’s not really anyone’s idea, it’s just an idea, so we’re going to take it and kind of put our own spin on it.  The Ecstasy of Influence and whatnot.  So here we go, our personal spin.  The photos attached hail from Spring 2009, all snapped here in Portland.

Indian Autumn

Well, we got what we wanted: summer was extended a full month, by popular request.  Well now it’s Autumn, known to us by the hue of leaves outside our window as we look up into the cerulean blue sky and say oh hey come here look at this it’s an osprey, circling — observe as its trajectory takes it across the sun like an eclipse, light blasting through its feathers and illuminating its talons!  But it’s a warm Autumn, one that urges us to walk a little further on our afternoon jaunts, seeking vistas to look down from and sunlit patches to read our books in.  So we’re calling it Indian Autumn.  You should too.  It feels right, don’t it?

Soyrizo

Hands down the greatest fake meat of all time.  It’s so beyond the concept of fake meat that it’s actually just real food.  Real good food.  Our suggestion?  Toss some down in some in a pan with a little baby spinach and some red peppers and throw the whole thing in a tortilla with shredded cheese, dash a little hot sauce up in that piece and you’re pretty much good to go.  Enjoy.

Fresh Hopped Beer

The hops don’t get dried out or stored or anything.  They get picked, fresh, and then within the hour they are thrown into the mix and the beer is made.  When done properly, the taste is so fresh and of the earth you suddenly realize: oh yeah, weird, beer is a vegetable.

Lorrie Moore

The current hype is about her current book.  We’re reading her previous book, Birds of America.  We cannot, cannot, cannot believe how much we are loving this.

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

We really like listening to this, especially when we are doing dishes.  You just make sure to wear a shirt with a breast pocket.  Then you stuff the iPod in the breast pocket and put on the headphones and queue up the New Yorker Fiction Podcast.  Then you listen to something interesting, maybe it’s Richard Ford reading you a John Cheever story that nearly brings you to tears, or perhaps it’s John Updike’s former editor reading you a John Updike story and nearly bringing himself to tears.  Meanwhile you’re so engrossed in the thing that holy crap look you did it!  The dishes are done!

Ale Watching

Portland Beer Update:  we’ve definitely caught the craze of trying as much of the recent batch of Fresh-Hopped beers that are pouring currently all over town.  The clear winner, for us, at the moment, is Alameda’s Failing St. Fresh Hop.  The experience is a total rush of floral flavor and refreshment.  Refreshment!  Where the fresh becomes re-freshed.  Taste and you’ll believe too.

Something we were not that into: Bridgeport Black Strap Porter.  Don’t get us wrong — it’s good.  Screwing up beer in Portland is kind of like screwing up a plate of fries for someone who is hungry: you kinda can’t do it.  But compared to something like the Deschutes Obsidian Stout, which we had poured for us from a nitro tap, well, there’s really no comparison.  Where the Black Strap is dark and strong and good, the Obsidian hits you with an actual black strap of chocolate, coffee, toffee — all those words you see bandied around when it comes to stouts but which you kind of tend to shrug off and think, um, like a Guinness?  No not like a Guinness.  More like: like you mean it.  Really mean it.  On a crisp October night at Bailey’s Taproom, the lights of Broadway zoomin too and fro outside the big glass windows, relaxing after a long day of Pacific beachcombing and roadtrip tunes through the pines, we were ready for something hearty, something warming, and something good.  Our expectations were high; suffice it to say, the Obsidian Stout surpassed them.

Not impressed: the Bear Republic Racer X.  It’s a Double IPA, so we expected something a little intense.  We got intense, but it wasn’t an interesting intense.  Super tangy/bitter like grapefruit juice and not that easy going down, it’s too strong with not enough good reason to be so.  We’re not saying we’d deny a Racer X if you handed us one, oh heck no we’d say cheers and hopefully you’d enjoy one with us, it’s just that after all the triumphs we’ve tasted as of late, we’re spoiled.  And we’re saying that’s a good thing.

We’ll Come Back For Indian Summer

Hark, fellow Miltonians.  We’re back.  September has been a delight, a sun-warmed Indian Summerland of bright light and long shadows, beckoning citizens across our fair metropolis to lean and loaf at their ease, basking like cats.  Things return: Vaux’s Swifts to the Chapman School, Fringe on Fox, the Office on NBC, Mary from Montana, and our appetites for tightly packed poetry and dark and delicious ales.

Heads up East Coast: the Daily Miltonian will touch down in the Delaware Valley sometime during the first half of Novemeber.  The land sufficiently Autumnal, we will embark on a weeklong adventure including: New York City, the Brandywine Valley, the Pine Barrens, Rittenhouse Square, and Gandy’s Beach, in that exact and precise order.

In the meantime the aim is the keep busy by being lazy, which means no one is composing any music or penning any poems or painting any masterpieces, no, we’re too caught up in merely sufficing, which is to say, we’re alive, and we’re darn happy about it.  Whether you find us downtown eyeing up a movie marquee or in the back of a cafe sipping with a satisfaction, the conclusion is always the same: here we are now, entertain us.  There are books to be read, records to be absorbed, paintings to ogle and Bubbles to Bobble: our Gamertag is “pilotpandas” if you’re up to the challenge.

Fort Saint Davids Northwestern Explorer’s League: is there any place in Portland or the surrounding environs that you think the FSDNEL needs to check out or investigate?  Please let us know immediately.

We weren’t fans of Gary War at first.  But there we were, somewhere in the 20’s on NE Alberta, making our way to another Indian Summer barbecue, past mewling kittens in someone’s yard, and then there it all is, oh right, it’s Last Thursday, dancers, jugglers, beards, weirds, and really bad art.  We’re flipping through our tunes trying to find something to jam econo on the headphones and this one just kinda called out to us so we Qd it up and let it run loose, and really?  We were all right.  Real alien sounds meant to be blasted on low in a crowded strange street just like this one, but makes sure sky is sunsetting and that the clouds are real far away and don’t forget to keep yr eye on them as you make your way down the tripped up street, finding the lost, and feeling just fine.  Highspeed drift.

Fort Saint Davids Podcast continues!  There are currently two episodes available for FREE download on the Apple iTunes store and there is a third recorded and uploaded — it’s just a matter of our trusty tech dept. head Alex Zahradnik getting to it.  Make sure to click the SUBSCRIBE button so you never miss an episode.  How is it going?  It’s OK.  I’ll admit that having read the second full chapter it occurred to me how much I dislike that old book, so it’ll be a feat if I make it through reading the whole thing — then again, will you even listen to the whole thing?  Please direct your constructive feedback to the comments sections of the Daily Miltonian so we can get a dialogue going about what exactly everyone wants and needs and is getting from the Fort Saint Davids podcast.  I may take to reading newer material in some of the later episodes, just to mix things up (and to remind listeners — and myself! — that I’m a much better writer in 2009 than when I sat down to begin writing The Pilot and the Panda in 1998.)

Also please note that if you prefer the compact disc format we do offer hand-made CD-R editions of our podcast in the form of the above CD.  Please contact erikbader@gmail.com if you are interested in getting one of these and I’m sure we can work something out.  Each disc comes encased in a sturdy cardboard sleeve and is adorned with a one-of-a-kind piece of artwork by the lovely Mary Doyle.  They’re pretty special.

Our Brew of the Week is the Alameda Black Bear XX Stout.  Although we may still frolic the days away in the T-Shirted Indian Summer, the nights do get cool so it’s the perfect time to pour a good, dark, local beer, such as the Alameda Black Bear XX Stout, brewed right here in Portland.  We enjoyed this one with some homemade veggie sushi and Trading Places on DVD while the family cat snacked in the kitchen, but you do it as you feel.  As a Miltonian, it’s always your choice.

Hard to believe the Daily Miltonian is nearly three years old.  We’ll keep you posted on how we’re going to celebrate.