Pizza State Of The Union
Oh hi! I know I haven't been around here much. This is because I spent last week sailing on a sea of sneezing—every waking moment devoted to mucus management. New life development: I'M ALLERGIC TO SPRING.
On another note entirely, recent happenings have me thinking heavily about pizza. The source of its power. My relationship to it. Et cetera.
If you're a Portlander, then you know that "pizza as art" is kinda having a moment right now (see below). But I'm just talking pizza as sustenance here—a nearly perfect food that's at its best when you're gut is so empty it's about to digest itself. Hot, crunchy but also soft, comforting, a modest food of the common man.
Basically, pizza rules because it's fucking easy and good. I'm sad about trends in my town toward overly fancy pizza with trumped-up prices and ingredients. Ovens fired with special woods. Drizzles with oils of truffle. Farm-to-table sausage toppings. And so on.
This trend—it's driving me to only make pizza at home now, a decree I already passed on breakfast years ago cuz I can make a WAYYY better chive and cheese scramble than I could EVER get for $9 after waiting in line for an hour eating out. Similarly, I can grab a ball of dough for 2 bux at Trader Joe's and in no time have an entire steaming pie!
Anyway, at a certain point, everyone's gotta ask themselves, "What does pizza mean to me?"
For every hot slice topped with simple cheese or whatever else is on hand (I'm not opposed to a pile of fresh arugula, but please, no potatoes—potatoes don't belong on pizza), it's the easy comfort of your surroundings and the kindness and love of the people you are with that makes it all GOOD.
Okay, I'm done now.
Pizza-hawk tattoo, courtesy of Screedler.
Subversive pizza art, courtesy of Dave Banks.
Pizza-skull sticker for Daddies Board Shop, courtesy of Screedler.
Waking at Night
Waking at Night
by Jack Gilbert
The blue river is grey at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.
Spring To Do List
1. Keep my seedlings alive until it's time to stuff them in the ground. The sitch is tenuous—a touch of mildew, mold, or blight and it's all over.
2. Adventure more. South? North? I care not.
3. Eat sandwiches and beer in the sun in the park.
4. Skate all the razor scooter parks while the children are still locked away in school.
5. Procure a butter dish. A small thing, sure—except I eat toast in no small amount and want, or actually NEED velvety room-temp butter to spread on said toast. You can't just have a stick of butter wrapped in its original wax paper sitting on the counter, though. That's crazy talk.
6. Take longer walks neath the flowered drooping trees.
Spring Broke
Spring break's for kids—or is it?! I'm gonna argue here that in the Northwest, us "grown ups" need it more. We bravely get up and out of bed everyday, carrying on the business of living as our hopes are routinely toyed with, lifted by dazzling sun and then crushed beneath senseless rain.
Anyway, a trip begged to be mine. I didn't care for how long. I didn't care about the forecast for "heavy rain." We were gonna walk beneath the cascading curtains at Silver Falls State Park (a fairy-tale type place you MUST see) and then suck in some of that arid pine-laced air in central Oregon. Yep, and in 48 hours we did all that. There was also incendiary Mexican food, many coffee breaks, a couple of llamas, and my very first time ever watching the movie Purple Rain (!!!!).
A quick voyage, to be sure—but I walked away anew.
Misty woods and it was raining very, very hard. Can you tell?
See? Fairy-tale type shit.
A Harry and the Hendersons moment up on Black Butte.
Inexplicably sunny at the Sisters skatepark and the gods (or whatever) are smiling upon us.
They call him Fernando.
Breadcrumb Trail—A Slint Documentary
Watched this rock doc the other night—an accounting of the band Slint, how they were a bunch of a weird teenagers doing their own damn thing and how one of my fave 90s albums Spiderland emerged from such unassuming locales as the Louisville, KY basement of Britt Walford's parents' house.
What I took away from the film is that where a band comes from means something. The town, the scene, the social climate, the streets themselves—it all flavors the music, for better or worse. I spent a night in Louisville once—sweated, ate a rotgut meal, and saw my first (only!) katydid creeping through the grass by the skatepark. But I wasn't there long enough to see what it was that makes "people in Louisville ... just fucking crazy" like Ian MacKaye says in this movie.
Anyway, these kids weren't just playing punk or garage like other teens in parents' basements across the country—they were masterminding disjointed, mathematical, sometimes kinda scary rock stuff—heading, formidably, in their own weird direction.
The movie was made by a fellow Portlander, Lance Bangs—a lovely guy who was there at the screening shaking hands and answering questions on a man-to-man basis. So cool. Make seeing this movie happen, people!
