At a recent tea party gathering outside Portland, a high-ranking Multnomah County Republican official asked for a show of hands from people who were satisfied with Mitt Romney as the GOP nominee. About 75 hands went up among the 400 or so in attendance, including mine.
6:28 PM 02/12/2011
It has been exactly a half century since Richard Yates’s first novel, Revolutionary Road, splashed down in the midst of John F. Kennedy’s Camelot. The theme of the emptiness of suburban existence had been explored before, but Tennessee Williams said at the time, “If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don’t know what it is.”
11:55 AM 02/01/2011
When I worked as a reporter for a Southwest Portland monthly a few years back, I got a glimpse of a world I had never experienced, the world of micro-local community organization. The editor of the Southwest Portland Post was committed to covering the various neighborhood associations, which are quite active amid the suburban hills and garden apartment blocks in that quadrant of the Rose City. I had occasion to sit in on quite a few neighborhood meetings and hear considerable discussion about controversial traffic change issues, the perils of proposed development, and environmental concerns.
9:23 AM 01/14/2011
October 31, 2000. George W. Bush had just dived into the crowd after giving a speech onstage at Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon. I remember thinking, “this is not safe.” From the worried looks of the Secret Service agents who moved to follow the presidential candidate into the sea of waving hands and crowding bodies, they didn’t think so either.
4:25 PM 12/23/2010
Talk about a holiday party pooper.
3:55 PM 12/03/2010
“She saw a bullfight in Maravatio, and was sickened by it, but got her sketches just the same.” -- from Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose
