NO PLACE LIKE HOME

Good to get away, great to come back.

POVEY BROTHERS STAINED GLASS

The Povey Brothers are considered to be Tiffany of the West Coast.

These images come from First Baptist Church (where Norman invited me to join his Barber Shop Chorus) and First Christian Church, both in Portland.

PORTLAND: AZAR CHOCOLATE

Perfection in a cup

PORTLAND: MORNING WALKABOUT

PORTLAND: NOB HILL

The most magical bookshop in the world.

COMING SOON TO PORTLAND ART MUSEUM (AND MAYBE THE WORLD)

There are four main contenders for taking out the human race:

1) A pandemic.

2) An asteroid striking the planet.

3) Nuclear explosions (by design or by accident).

And, most likely of all...

4) The eruption of a major volcano.

OREGON: NO SALES TAX

There Aren't many good haberdashers left.
It isn't even part of spell-check's vocabulary: texting changed it to haha dashers.

Want to indulge in a spot of retail therapy?

To hell with California and up to 10 percent sales tax.

Go to Oregon: zero sales tax (including restaurants).

And if you really want to bat the system, reside in Vancouver, WA (north side of the Columbia River).

No state income tax in Washington state and you need only cross the I-5 Bridge for all shopping needs.

On Cloud: Most comfortable walking shoes I've ever worn

PORTLAND: SOUTHPARK SEAFOOD

Freshest oysters on the half-shell, king salmon, and a flight of Willamette Valley pinot noir.

Doesn't get any better.

THE FEAST OF THORRABLOT: PART TWO

Whale steak

Reykjavik, Iceland, January 2002

At seven o’clock in the evening, Thomas Van Stein and Erik the Red truck into Hotel Holt from the dark and cold.  

Floater and I are lurking in the lobby.  

Erik shakes his head.  “You have no idea what we’ve been through today.” He says this with a Scottish accent thicker than usual because his tongue is eighty percent frozen.  He motions at Van Stein.  “Him, especially.”  




The artist looks as if he’s been plugged into an electrical sub-station. His face is freeze-burned, hair frizzled, eyes ablaze with madness. He can hardly speak.

Kristjan, our driver/guide, nods. The King of Hardy himself is impressed by Van Stein’s indifference to the elements in his quest to capture nature at its most absurd.

One hour later, we launch on foot to a seafood restaurant called Vid Tjornina.  

“I got kissed by the devil today,” whoops Van Stein, warming to candlelight on our table, drunk on accomplishment.

Erik the Red explains:  While Van Stein painted a geyser in sub-frozen conditions, the dang thing changed direction and slapped him hard before freezing to ice.  

Talk about wind chill.  

“It was the biggest blow of the day,” says Erik.

“In other words,” I say, “Thomas made a pass at a hot hole and got geyser-whacked?”

“No.”  Van Stein stiffens.  “I tried to paint the devil, and he blew me a kiss.  From the abyss.”

“Wait until you discover you’re pregnant,” I say.

“I have seen fortitude today,” says Erik.

“No,” I say.  “Forty-two fetuses.  When Rantanal Oldham [our eccentric London driver] hears about this, he‘ll insist on conducting a combination exorcism/abortion.”

“You want to know about hell?” Van Stein shudders.  “Kristjan showed us the Drowning Pool.”

“The what?” says Floater.

“It’s a river out there, where the Vikings took their unfaithful wives. To drown them.”

“A perfectly acceptable ritual,” says Erik.  “I should have done that to my first wife when I found her in bed with my brother.”

“And afterwards,” says Van Stein.  “After they drowned their wives, there’s a geothermal spa nearby where they’d celebrate with a hot bath.”

That’s the way it was with Berserkers a millennium ago.  When foul weather postponed faraway forays of rape and pillage, one of them would get bored and slaughter his family for the sheer hell of it, and his friends would say, D’ya hear? Wolf the Unwashed went berserk yesterday, needs another woman.

We drink Chablis and order something that, in Icelandic, reads like dead pike smelling dyke.  And if that’s not enough, Floater’s small potatoes turn out to be rams testicles, part of a plot to Thorrablot him.

“So what did you guys do,” sneers Van Stein.

“You kidding?" I say. "While you were out watching Mother Nature fart sulphur and steam, Floater and I did the real work, laying down the runtur.   And that’s not all,” I add.  “We ran into that cultural attaché.”

“You mean the guy we wrote to before we left California?” says Van Stein.

“Yup.”

Van Stein closes one eye, dribbles Chablis.  “But wasn’t he supposed to be out of town and that's why he wouldn't meet us?”

“Damn right he was. I caught the lying son of a whore at a place called Café de Paris.”

“But how’d you know it was him?”

“There aren’t many Americans around here,” I say.  “Aside from a nutcase named Don who walks around this frozen country for kicks.  Anyway, this guy is obviously American in his navy blazer and L.L. Bean lined chinos and anorak.  And then I heard him say he works at the embassy.”

“To who?”

“Heidi.”

“Who the hell’s Heidi?”

“Maybe my next wife.  For now, a waitress at Café de Paris.  The embassy guy tries to chat her up while his girlfriend is using the john.  So I ask him, where did the cultural attaché go this weekend?  And he says, I’m the cultural attaché.  So I tore him a new rectum.”

“This isn’t true,” says Van Stein.

“Floater?”  

Floater nods.  

“I told him," I continue, "you foreign-service pukes are just a bunch of pant-load do-nothings.”

“No!  What did he say?”

“He tried to ignore me.  So I raised my voice and called him a lying-son-of-a-whoremaster, right in front of his girlfriend, and everyone else. Everyone in Café de Paris applauded.  I don’t think they’re fond of Americans here, especially the ones who work for the government.  That’s when he got pissed-off.  Said he was going to fix me good, wanted to know my name.”

“And?” asks Van Stein.

“I told him.”

“Told him what?”

“Told him I’m an artist named Thomas Van Stein.”

Van Stein turns to Erik the Red.  “You hear that?  This is what I get from him all the time.  He meets some mystery American in the hotel bar at the Lowndes Hotel in London and tells me I can’t come down to see who it is.”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t come down.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“No I didn’t.  What I said was, Stay in your room, I’ll let you know when you can come out.”

Van Stein howls.  “So what happens next?” he asks.

“You mean the runtur?”

“No, the cultural attaché.”

“When I get home, I e-mail the Snake Department and report what a do-nothing he is.”

“And?”

“They promote him.  They prefer do-nothings, it‘s safer for them.”

The waitress asks if we need dessert.

It’s not a need thing, baby, it’s a want.

“I’ll have the Devil’s Delight,” whoops Van Stein, reading from the menu.

“I thought you had it earlier,” says Floater.

“I want to reminisce.”

THE PORTLAND PENNY

The flip of a coin, this U.S. penny minted in 1835, decided (in 1845) whether this moist city, at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers, should be named Portland or Boston.

Its two early settlers, Asa Lovejoy from Boston, Massachusetts, and Francis Pettygrove from Portland, Maine, wanted to name their new home after their respective hometowns.

A two-out-of-three coin toss settled the matter.

The actual coin is on view at the Oregon Historical Society Museum.

Portland Penny

CASE STUDY COFFEE ROASTERS

A very welcome sight after a brisk thirty-minute walk through dark, moist downtown Portland.

Hi to you, too!

THE FEAST OF THORRABLOT: PART ONE

To celebrate the first day of Iceland's Thorrablot feasting festival, here is a blast from the past; specifically, January 2002.

It began like this:

"Only one word of Icelandic ever made it into the English language," I tell Van Stein, the artist. "Do you have any idea what that word is?"

"Hit me."

"Berserk," I whisper.

The reason I'm whispering is because we're in Starbucks, Montecito, and most of the other patrons around us already think we're nuts.

"Berserk," Van Stein echoes. "Of course! Norse warriors, the Beserkers. You're right, we need to go there."

"In January, during Thorrablot."

"Thorra-what?"

"A three week feast."

Van Stein smacks his lips.

"They serve seal flippers, rotted shark, which they bury for three months till it's good and rotted, boiled sheep's head, raw whale blubber, and pickled ram's testicles. For dessert they make lamb's liver pudding."

This is a hearty people, descended from the Vikings. They've been doing Thorrablot since 1878, when they became independent from Denmark (before Pepto Bismo was invented).

Van Stein is rocking back and forth. "How do you know all this?" he asks.

"I've been meaning to do Iceland for a while, did my research. I guess I needed to connect with a nocturnal artist before actually going there."

"I don't know," says Van Stein.

"What don't you know?"

"I've got more commitments than money."

"Money shouldn't mean squat to an artist," I say.

"Yep, squat's all I got."

"Not if you make it to Iceland. Then you'll have the runtur."

"The what?"

"Their version of a pub crawl. It doesn't start till after midnight, when the locals are already blasted on a native schnapps called Black Death. As an artist, you could do a whole show around Iceland. Call it Purity. You already paint Santa Barbara blindfolded. How about a real challenge?"

Van Stein falls off his chair, picks himself up and brushes latte foam from his lips. "That's it!" he hollers. "I'm going to Patagonia in Ventura to buy long-johns!"