Spring 2023 playlist

 Dear readers of Tape Mountain Secret Blog, 

Here is my secret Spring 2023 playlist of tracks that clicked. Track listing below for those who avoid YouChoob. The Messendger is a guilty pleasure for which I ask your forgiveness.

Happy Valley e-bike ambassador program

My wife and I bought the least expensive acceptable e-bike at a certain mall co-op recently. Mainly for her, but I knew I'd use it too. 

Today we had the day off, so I rode it up the sheer face of Mt. Scott to our fancy-pants neighbors to the east, Happy Valley (they're having their yearly "garage sale," i.e. mostly Costco stuff from a couple years back). People flipped. Everyone wanted to talk about it and ask me how I liked it. An older Korean couple looked at it, got close to the handlebars, nodded, and gave me a thumbs up. One lady selling Rollerblade gear mentioned that she'd love an e-bike but just can't afford it (note: Z*ll*w valuation of house nearly a million). One guy asked what the range is (30-40 miles per the website) and mentioned that he was looking into some mail-order brand that could go 150 miles with dual batteries. Once he moved onto his sailboat, he was going to put it on his dinghy and sail it across the seas, pick up provisions when in port. Power to you and your dream.

I climbed bonkers hills without much effort, got totally lost in the whorls of cul-de-sacs*. I had to ask dinghy guy and the older Korean couple how to make it back to the main road. Eventually their advice got me to Sunnyside Road where Jeeps and lifted RAMs and lowered Acuras zoomed past me, though I caught them all at the red light by the hospital, then turned off and went home.

The aggressive wealth and bland McMansion sameiness of that place always turns me off, but the nice thing about yard sales is that it exposes the occasional weird underbelly. The "Jump Rope for Heart" duffel bag that someone has held onto for 35 years. The faux-French water dispenser and darling vintage white plastic Korean metronome. The assless French maid lingerie still in box next to the battery-powered kids' ride-on police car. I guess if you zoom in close enough on any place, there's some weirdness to be seen, though some places you have to zoom into the molecular level.

*PS: it took great effort not to use the fancypants plural culs-de-sac

New Old Portland/Little Obsessions

I played a show with the legendary Jennifer Robin on Sunday at the legendary Clinton St. Theater and it was, as to be expected, legendary. Jennifer's soul sister and quasi-döppelganger Mara was doing a release for a lathe-cut record and bringing a bunch of fellow weirdos on stage to set the stage. Both Jennifer and I commented on how this felt very Old Portland in the sense of bringing that combo of scrappy and weird, but I thought it also felt very New Portland in how inclusive it was (old Portland was a little bit lumberjack-boys-club), and how the merch table only accepted Venmo. I wore a white synthetic jumpsuit on stage and probably sweated off five pounds of water weight in fifteen minutes. Recommended.

Things that I really liked:

The wild music videos from TERMINATor that played, including "Rat, Hopefully the Boy," whose wild mixture of flute loops, food styling, and boudoir/Daisies aesthetics made me very happy

Public Pleasure and their Keith Levene-channeling guitar and their wonderful mix of volume and vulnerability on stage

The song that Mara premiered, total June-uary summer hit, especially when filtered through lathe-cut record sound quality:

Grandpa What's a Powerviolence

In the early 90s I had a subscription to Maximum Rock 'n' Roll and I bought things that were cheap and looked interesting. I think I've mentioned Bleeeeaaaauuuurrrrgggghhhhh!!!!! and the various works of Slap A Ham Records before, or at least I hope I have? Anyway somehow I stumbled upon No Comment's Downsided (YouChoob link) which I know I owned at some point because I remember everything here, though somehow I must have bleached my memory of the aggressively awful cover? I mean, aggressively awesome? 

In any case, it is pretty great if you have any interest in that sort of thing - which I did not realize was called "powerviolence" until much much later, and which probably would have led me as a young pacifist to stay away - and perfectly terrible if you do not. I don't think I still own it - it must have been lost at some radio station or other, lost in the cosmic churn that ended up with several records walking home with someone else and several others wandering home with me. Someone else ended up with a cover of a child being birthed, a fetus, someone sitting bleakly on a curb, cigarettes. Maybe it's for the best.

I accidentally added this album to my "Cheese" playlist, so I ended up listening to Bob Welch's "Sentimental Lady" immediately afterwards.

Temporary band shirts/secret bike paths

Today it was one of those hot ones, a good time to bring out a thin t-shirt. My thin shirt of choice these days is this particular shirt from The Toads (or, if you're Disqwogzz, "The Toads (10)") Matt K. wears it better than I do, of course. One of the things that I like about it is the fact that it does not state the band name. This is a trend I can get behind. Not all band names lend themselves to such nonverbal communication styles, of course, but what if???

Wearing the shirt of a band that is defunct but not for so long is a little embarrassing, right, particularly if the band name wasn't something you want to explain to people? (c.f. my Chook Race shirt, see profile pic). But what if the new etiquette were to print the band name in some sort of ink that disappears after four years or so? Then you'd just have a shirt with a picture on it. 

Of course there are cred points to be had for wearing shirts with the name of a long-defunct band that people actually remember and still care about, I guess, but my history has been to throw my hat in with the underdog, which means I have a lot of cred points that no one will ever know about because they see "TRASH" and don't automatically assume, "oh, that Alpaca Brothers spin-off project that put out 'On and On with Lou Reed.'" But what if it was just this picture, minus the "TRASH"? That would be all right.

It being one of those hot ones, of course I had the bright idea to ride my bike to Qwostqwo because I had forgotten brown rice and tofu previously. Plus Gwoogwoo Mapz was suggesting some sort of extra-squiggly bike path as Option #2 - wait, how did I not know about a mysterious bike path joining the I-205 bike path with the Clackamas Qwostqwo? It could be awesome or it could end up with me in the newspaper, but thankfully it was the former. Who knew.

 

Keyboard/kindygardy

Currently listening to this very nice gamelan album with the window while typing. The drums and the construction hammering outside and my keyboard all sound good together.

Speaking of my keyboard: I've been switching off between my two cheapo FreeGeek-sourced Das Keyboards: a brown-switch one with blank keycaps and a blue-switch one with non-blank keycaps. I had thought I preferred the noisy blues, but they kind of drown everything out and make my ears ring. So browns it is. But I'm not enough of a wizard/zen master* to work with blank keycaps. I use too many keyboard shortcuts. So I've been swapping keys out as time permits:

I appreciate the fact that it looks like a molting bird, kind of awkward-looking while it gets its summer set of feathers.

The kid is just about finished with a year of Spanish-immersion kindergarten and I'm amazed at how well he's taken to it. We're reading a library-discard Spanish translation of Richard Scarry's Great Big Schoolhouse at bedtime and it's amazing hearing him interact with me in Spanish. As an American I get thrown off by all the vosotros pronouns (did no Latin American version of this exist, Multnomah County Library?), but kid rolls with it. I always admire attempts to translate abecedariums (abecedaria?) Also, I am going to need to seriously up my spoken Spanish game.

*Note: "Jedi" is probably the most appropriate term to use here, but the official position of this blog is that the Star Wars film universe does not exist.