The blues will never go out of fashion

After a week of taking the bus, I rode my bike again today. It’s hot in Portland — both suffocating and burning if you’re out there long enough — and I had to concentrate so that my lungs got their rhythms back just right. But my legs are still strong, my balance still steady.

Somehow I was surprised.

I keep seeing Portland in new ways. All along I have thought I would be here temporarily, like any day now some great newspaper job would invent itself in the South, and I would run happily back. I’d be tan and eat snowcones and see my brother whenever I damn well please.

Newspapers being where they are, that is serious dreaming, but here’s the thing: Lately, I’m not even dreaming for it anymore.

Maybe I’m just carrying it with me? Talking more thickly, cooking red beans and rice and sharing more stories.

Or maybe I’m just loosening up, learning to look at Portland, eyes-wide-open. This has happened twice this week. Once, I was riding the bus over the Broadway bridge. I was a reading a New Yorker piece about something or another and listening to Tupac. I looked across the river and realized that I am, still, wholly myself. What a gift.

Then again, today, biking over the Hawthorne Bridge, I looked down and saw so many sail boats docked alongside the blues festival. It’s no Subway Lounge — the Mississippi club where I went in college. It didn’t open till midnight, and you could get in with any ID (literally, I frequently used a 45-year-old black man’s ID), and if you wanted beer or hot dogs, you had to go to a house next door. It stayed open till 4 a.m. till one day it all came crashing down and the musicians (formerly sweaty and crammed into such small spaces) moved down the road to Schimmel’s, a fancy, open-spaced, air-conditioned joint — but the blues festival on the river was a nice little reminder of home.

Anyway, I looked out at the river again and felt like I actually love being here.

I keep thinking I have lost something (myself, my muscles), but it’s always there. My essential truths are all in tact.

Everything I hold takes root.
I remember what the world was like before -- t. hayes

Music in the woods

I spent last weekend in the mountains of White Salmon, Wash., just a few miles away from the Columbia River Gorge, making a music video with a crew of about 20 people. I'll post the video here when it's out, but for now, here are some shots from the weekend:

Nine months later, life as wrecking ball

You'll find me revved like a motorboat, gliding [chugging?] over water. Did I make those waves? Were they there before? And what of motion? Does it mean anything at all?


//

Bicycles clanging

Last week, I made this video. Being there, taking notes by Pedicab, I felt so freakishly happy to be in Portland:

Around 4:30, after practice, Jason Fromme climbed into the back of a pedicab and prepared to conduct a symphony. About 40 bicyclists stood parked before him, singing a "low, pleasing melody."

"All right, let's see if we can make something nice," he told them, and they set off.

The event director, Mattie Kaiser, looked part bicyclist, part musician, wearing a white gown and a helmet as she led the crowd. Kaiser's the head of Classical Revolution, a group of 20- and 30-somethings dead-set on making classical musical accessible for all. During Pedalpalooza, that means taking the music -- by bike -- to the streets.

The group performed "How I came to Chicago and why" while riding along the Park blocks.

Galen Huckins -- a 22-year-old composer whom Kaiser calls "Boywonder" -- wrote the piece after a cross-country bike trip two years ago. He woke up in Indiana one morning, determined to bike to Chicago by nightfall. The symphony is what the 144-mile trip sounded like, he said. It's the sound of countryside giving way to urban sprawl, of a body long worn out, of a bike's natural squeakiness.

Not that any of that sounds particularly gorgeous. Wednesday's symphony was more Portland weird than orchestra pretty. But the musicians were smiling the entire time. And the onlookers who stopped to watch the noise-makers riding by seemed to like it.

The cyclists whooshed. They rang bells. They banged on their bike frames with silverware.

"I'm not getting a good sound out of this," one guy said, clanking a fork against his frame. "I think it's my bike."

The street offered its own improvised melodies: Motorcycles blared by, birds chirped, a couple fought over a suitcase, a man asked for change.

To hear a snippet of the symphony, watch the video.

Portland Bike Symphony from Casey Parks on Vimeo.

Spring in motion

What I did this Spring:

Spring 2009 from Casey Parks on Vimeo.

Love the hell out of

The house across from Natalie's street is abandoned. But otherwise, much of what I loved about New Orleans was the same, including Jessica -- wild and electric, wearing outfits only she'd come up with. Walking through the French Quarter, a man hollered to her, "I love the hell out of that hat."

I did, too.

"We went to the swamp today"

We were eating at Cafe Du Monde when this kid next to us started making the craziest faces at us. "We went to the swamp today," he told me, then started making these flirting funny faces. His parents said, "Christopher, make a nice face" for the photo, and this is what he did:





Also, I don't love this photo as much, but I love this kid's ears immensely. After much persuading by his old brother, this was his good face:



I let him take a picture of me, and I, too, had powdered sugar on my face: