(Portland, Oregon) A new restaurant project is promising to bring back the gangbuster Portland culinary scene, by going where the local, creative farm-to-table has feared to tread: the comfortable familiarity of the global commercial food industry. A goal of the nascent effort is to bring economic relief to chefs who have lost businesses to the one-two punch of pre-pandemic real estate frenzy and pandemic shutdowns. Setting aside the experimental devolution of Portland’s indie past, the new restaurant will give chefs a nightly opportunity to “cover” successful dishes from America’s most popular restaurants including Olive Garden, Outback Steakhouse, and Applebees. There […]
Journal
Silent movies on the moon
Light travels through a vacuum; this is good news for art. We could watch a silent movie on the moon, or see a gallery opening on an asteroid, or read a book of poetry on a spacewalk. Assuming we don’t convert sound to electromagnetic transmission, to enjoy a concert we will still need air or some similar gang of molecules, bouncing the waves from the orchestra or loudspeakers into our ears. These materialist signal-transmission mechanisms omit the key element though. The physics of art can happen, theoretically, without the soul, but the medium is not the defining aspect. If we […]
Journal
Dusk-dreaming
The equinox sunrise glows gray behind the curtain. A bird’s shadow flies, close by. I know there will be equal hours of dark and light outside. This will change quickly; parity is not equilibrium. The shadow will spread more, across each day. Here’s a trick our ancestors knew in their smoky villages: in the winter, make things. Fill the cooling evenings with something you can create with your hands, with your voice, with your dusk-dreaming.