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: