last weekend
Thursday, I went to see Autopilot Is For Lovers again, and their associates in Americana-acoustic-picking, Porches. It was a benefit show for a group who installs clean water wells in areas around the world without any clean water... cuz not everybody in the world drinks Dasani and Evian. They charged $5, so I gave $7. It was an evening of much acoustic music: accordion, violin, mandolin, and so on. At a couple times between bands, they noted that very few people had entered the raffles. They had a $10 Powell's card, a fairly nice kitchen cutting board, and a $40 cutting board. I figured I'd give another dollar to the cause, hoping to get the Powell's card to get another 33 1/3 Series book. It turned out that Adrienne from Autopilot won it. I won the $40 cherrywood cutting board. Guess I can get rid of my plastic one now. I asked Adrienne if she was gonna get a 33 1/3 book. She said nope, she needs to get a bartender guide since she'll be doing that at the Art Bar downtown. I asked her what a greyhound was. She knew; that made one of us. (I drink straight liquor, ya know.)
Friday I went to see Neil Hamburger at the Doug Fir. It had been a while since I hit the Fir. I biked to the show, in proper Portland fashion. The opening comic was some idiot named Darryl somethingorother. He told a bunch of "mock" sexist and weed jokes. It was one of those deals where... I dunno, he seemed like an actual sexist creep who told bad jokes, on some level. The crowd started heckling him, in manners more inventive than his jokes, which was cool. A guy behind me kept yelling "Tell another weed joke!" Darryl said some crap about liking unprotected sex, and someone yelled, "You sleepin' with a LOT OF HOOKERS?!" Anyway, yeah, final score: hecklers 5, Darryl 0.
Hamburger's band came out and did a couple instrumentals to start the show, and they were cooking; great countrybilly songs. His drummer is Prairie Prince from The Tubes, the bass player was Atom Ellis who plays in The New Cars (when Neil announced he had "members of The New Cars," the audience laughed and errr I thought it was a joke), and Dave Gleason on guitar. The songs were... uniformly GOOD country! I mean good as in- I'm going to buy the album this week, as in I've watched the "Jug Town" video on YouTube about a dozen times in the last 6 days.
The jokes were great too. I'd heard he recycles the same old material, but this was NOT the case for me, anyway. I've seen his stand-up on YouTube, and only knew 2 or 3 jokes at his show. If you're interested, you can go look em up there. You can also see excellent full-hour interviews he did on PoolsideChats dot com with: Tim And Eric, Kyle Gass, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, and more. My fave joke at his show was:
Q- Why did God invent Domino's Pizza?
A- To punish humanity for its complacency during The Holocaust.
...look, it's in the man's delivery, his perfect comic timing, that this stuff works. Also, if you have a certain distaste for fast food and celebrities, and/ or the stupid stand-up-joke-style jokes about said things.
Saturday night, I saw my friend Kevin's band, The Cut & Run, at The Bitter End. The opening band was okay, but the best bonus was being across from PGE Park when the soccer game let out, resulting in a large paying crowd and big door-receipts for the bands. TC&R sounded great; Tristan gets some very Gilmour/ Clapton/ Ray Vaughn sustains on those solos, and everything was really on. After the band played, we heard a sort of rising, roaring din outside... went outside... yep, it's that time of year again. Naked Bike Ride. The annual midnight nude bike ride went down and up Burnside (the main east/ west road in the city), and... it looked like about 3000 naked people to me. I knew it was popular, but figured a couple hundred folks would do it, maybe! The Willamette Week today reported the attendance at 1500; I'd say that was very low in estimation. Various levels of nudity, but mostly total-ass nudity. Various types of bike! Fancy, beaters, off-road, pricey racers, rickshaws, tall-frames (and, unfortunately, a lot of old, out-of-shape guys on recumbent bikes. Nuf said?). Various types of people, not just Jackass-worthy guys; it was Pride weekend too, adding some more diversity. A couple of times, guys crashed in front of us. I guess it gets kinda crowded with all the nude going on; some baaad road rash without clothes, ya know... but they sucked it up and kept going. Sidewalk dwellers, us included, were high-fiving bikers as they went by.
Sunday was Portland Pride Day. I got up, put on some nice clothes and my tux blazer, smoked a tremendous amount of tree, and road the bus in town. Maybe felt a little shaky on the bus, but things evened out by the time I hit the parade route. An at-first disappointingly small crowd in Pioneer Square turned into a pretty large one by actual start time. It's funny, The Oregonian played up the "ooh, it's so risque" angle, but I thought it was a lot more sexual in 2006. This year's was pretty mellow, almost tame, a lot less nude flesh but all fun.
I got spanikopita at a decent Greek place, and noticed when charging my meal that... my bank card was gone. Must've dropped out at the bus stop! So I called to cancel it, sadly knowing there would be no drinkie for me at the post-parade Festival... not that I needed it, in retrospect. Waiting for Scream Club to go onstage, I sat through one band trying to read At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, and... I was waaay too blazed to read it. I thought it was incredibly abstract, but... um, reading it today, it's not. Hmm. Dirty Martini played, and... ehh. Lilith Fair. They were okaaay. Anyway, Scream Club came on, and I really dug it. The "band" (i.e. their computer) was acting up a bit at first, but settled by song two, and I was still gacked enough to dance like a total idiot when the set got going.
btw, I don't have to like... "announce" I'm kinda queer, do I? My sex life generally doesn't come up, in blogs or in conversation offline, since it does not exist, but I might as well put to rest all the rumors that I'm very straight. I know I talked a bit about cross-gender crushes, male and transsexual, for all the people that knew me back when I blogged regularly on SuicideGirls dot com, but I've also been pretty inactive at blogging on here, and, reading up on gender/ queer theory, I've found that's basically where I guess I'm at- genderqueer. I suppose I "mostly" like women, but that smacks of 1) appeasement to homophobes and straights ("I'm not that queer"), 2) distancing myself from queerness, 3) putting some narrowly-defined label on my psyche, identity, imagination, etc., which I want to avoid. Still, it's kinda true... although also true that I have attractions to all sorts of people (woman, man, transpeople, transsexuals, intersexed people, androgynes) beyond a linear gender binary system. Anyway, I don't mind talking about it, if anyone wants... I dunno that anyone really wants to discuss my sexuality... but figured I'd at least address it, in the interest of prrrride.