Oregon Movies, A to Z

Mike Francis at the Oregonian drew attention today to the fact that  Misha Pemble-Belkin, from Hillsboro, appears as one of the key figures in Sebastian Junger’s and Timothy Heatherington’s war documentary, Restrepo.

From Francis’ Op Ed column:

Pemble-Belkin and his friends never sought the spotlight, but he’s glad that “Restrepo” was made. “It’s not just telling our story,” says the now-24-year-old. “It’s telling the story of about everybody who’s been deployed.”

Pemble-Belkin, home from the tour of duty in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, expects to be deployed to Afghanistan again.

I hereby claim Restrepo as an Oregon film, on the basis of the Oregon citizenship of Misha Pemble-Belkin, one of the soldiers profiled in the doc.

Thanks, and tip of the hat to Mike Francis.

John Callahan—Author / Cartoonist / Songwriter

July 1951-July 24, 2010 (both Portland, OR)

In grateful memory © 2010 David Milholland

John Callahan is adopted by a Catholic family in The Dalles, Oregon soon after his birth to a young, unmarried Catholic woman in nearby Portland. Mrs. Callahan, unfruitful to that moment, almost immediately becomes pregnant and soon thereafter turns out a full complement of siblings.

The young Callahan, with his life-long mane of red hair, sets a quick pace for his provincial western community—a mischief maker from an early age. In one of several cartoon features we publish in Clinton St. Quarterly, John is pictured stabbed with a fork, as are all his five siblings, for breaking house rules laid down by their no-nonsense father.

Exaggeration? No, artistic license refined to a high pitch early in his career.

Another CSQ feature captures the recent high school graduate working in the local mental hospital, now Columbia Gorge Community College. John and his late-night-shift colleagues learn all about and experiment with the psychotropic medicines they dose out, administer electro-shock therapy, befriend and befuddle their essentially incarcerated wards.

No wonder that John early on dials into abusive alcohol consumption. This depressing work makes any vision for the future far from appealing. His tales of bravado under the influence, staple yarns of extended adolescence, catch the fancy of his peers stimulating even wilder bacchanals and near-mythic fables.

But this cycle fades away. The true opening of John’s bildungsroman takes place on a Los Angeles freeway off ramp when John and a drunken-driver buddy flip and pile into oblivion. In the cartoon version, before discovering that he’s paralyzed for life, John tells the attending patrolman, “There’s a five-dollar bill in my left shirt pocket, get me a short case.”

Needless to say he keeps drinking with lamentable results, until years later, in Mt. Angel, Oregon, John has an epiphany and puts the bottle aside, for good. The CSQ feature on this entire process “I Think I Was an Alcoholic” is a succinct masterpiece.

I first meet the recently sober Callahan living in public housing just behind the newly constructed Food Front Co-op. I am editing its newsletter. In short order John is turning out canny cartoons featuring “relentless” cheese and unveiling his takes on our culture, which coupled with his rapier wit, launches a syndicated one-panel comic career and the autobiographical features we publish in CSQ. Several books and multiple television series loom on the horizon, but John lives in the here and now, mostly one comic image at a time.

Watching John develop a single cartoon, nearly all produced under looming Willamette Week deadlines [en route to international syndication], is a short course in the creative process. John banters around ideas, plumbs anyone nearby or near a phone for suggestions, and then plays with 2 or 3 possibilities, flipping them around—mentally and verbally—until a punch line emerges. He then clutches a sharpie pen in both hands and begins drawing an image to fit the phrase. Sometimes he hits it on the first round, but more often image and phrase duel a while, with both subject to mutation in the process. Then boom, they fit together like a glove, and he’s off the hook for another week.

John is a relentlessly creative and social human being. He marries the two whenever possible. Though he craves the sun, misty Portland is a perfect petri dish for his talents; a foil for his politically incorrect notions. Callahan craves a gut-roiling laugh, quite frequently at his own expense, but just as frequently against the grain of what many considered reasonable. John’s quadriplegia is both a debilitating handicap and a springboard for insight and expression of what others are experiencing, if not daring to utter.

With John no cow is sacred. Whatever pain we feel, we all self censure, crane around for justification, look for a route off the hook. Callahan’s cartoons stick the fork in and probe disquietude, that “not me Lord” feeling of embarrassment, whether it’s being caught unzipped, in over one’s head, or, for the never-been-embarrassed, in full-tilt hypocrisy.

Rather than pinning politicians to the insect display, to avoid terminal boredom and in his wit and wisdom, Callahan sees fit to examine us all. Whether his subject is a head on a skateboard, a portly woman wearing a muumuu, “Fat” writ large across its surface, or the Pope—they’re all busted. The post-alcohol realist message is—no whining, get over it, and on with it. Over and over the phrase resounds—“how does he get away with it?” The sole response: he just keeps turning it out.

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot (1989) raises his high-profile onto another plain. Soon John is bedeviled with long-distance phone calls, most frequently women drawn to his plight, vulnerability, and profound humor. His phone number changes, and changes again. Not long after its appearance, Robin Williams options the work for a major motion picture. For nearly two decades the possibility looms and then slowly, despite high-profile rewrites by the likes of Gus Van Sant, fades away.

The book appears in Dutch—Man Op Wielen. Perhaps that edition draws filmmaker Simone de Vries to seek out the subject of her biographical Touch me someplace I can feel (2007). The film catches John on both good and bad days, his endless attraction to young women, and his budding career as a singer-songwriter. The camera probes so close to the skin that after the premiere John says in the NW Film Center lobby, “I’m going out for a dermaflage.”

I’ll never forget Callahan’s sly smile, which emerges whenever a beautiful woman passes his way; as he nails a joke—in conversation or on the page; after meeting his hero Bob Dylan backstage at a Portland concert; or following his powerful performance of songs from his CD Purple Winos in the Rain, with Terry Robb, at NW Portland’s Music Millenium, now dark.

Suddenly, on a bright July day, John’s no longer with us.

Or he’s with us forever, in a differently-abled way.

He gives us his all for 30 years as an active artist, and 60 years on the planet.

Today, mere hours after his passing, people remark they saw him days ago wheeling down NW 21^st, or through the Portland State University halls. Callahan just keeps rolling along.

In my vision, John is now striding out, not perhaps in heaven but far from a dark place, his wheelchair ditched forever.

Thanks to Kevin Mullane for inspiration and friendship.

Look for notice of a commemoration event in early August.

Join us in helping put John back on the NW Portland streets soon with a memorial plaque.

Written in an emotional rush July 24, 2010, with a hasty post-midnight pre-hyperspace edit, by David Milholland.

If you missed Bill Plympton at Annecy International Animation Film Festival (aka the largest animation festival in the world) last month, you can make up for it by coming down to see him at Dante’s, 1 SW 3rd Ave, in Portland, on Monday night.

Here’s Bill’s report on the festival, filed from France:

Its been 50 years since the 1st Annecy animation festival gathering in 1960. Apparently it was a small affair: 50 people congregated to watch animation and party. This year being a big anniversary year they asked some of the biggest names in the business (John Musker, Nick Park, Peter Lord, Joanna Quinn, Ed Nazarov, Alexei Alexeev, Matt Groening, David Silverman, Michel Ocelot, Peter de Seve, Raoul Servais, Marv Newland, Paul Driessen, Bruno Bozzetto, Sylvain Chomet, and me) to help celebrate. They put us all up in the fancy Palais de Menthon on the other side of the lake. It’s right on the beautiful lac d’Annecy so every morning I got to take a refreshing swim in the crystal-clear waters.

Yes, that’s two (2) Oregon animators out of a list of sixteen total invited to Anncey’s 50th anniversary. What does Bill do in France? He says he goes swimming, and here’s proof.

Bill’s caption: Ready to jump in the canal.

Bill will be selling DVDs of Hair High (2004), fresh off the presses, at Dante’s.

Bill always felt Hair High was his best film ever, and was puzzled when it was not widely seen. All the attention received by Idiots and Angels (2009) — six billion film festival awards and counting – he was expecting to get five years earlier with this (comparatively) lavishly produced high school prom ghost/love story. So here’s your chance to own a film very dear to Plympton’s heart.

Eric Gilliland and Sarah Silverman provide the voices of the young lovers, Spud and Cherri.

Another reason for celebration: Bill is looking forward to the domestic theatrical release of Idiots and Angels (2009), which should be on American movie screens before the end of the year.

For more info about Bill: Emily Harris interviewed him today on OPB’s Think Out Loud.

Bill makes sure his fellow animators and filmmakers get a shout out, and begins crediting the entire Portland animation scene in his first answer, before he gets around to talking about himself.

In so doing, he has renewed his honorary membership  in the Oregon Cartoon Institute. Thanks, and a tip of the hat to Mr. Plympton.

In 1939, Oregon voice artist Pinto Colvig left Disney Studios, where he had originated the sublimely irrepressible Goofy, to work for a competing studio, the Fleischer Brothers, where he originated Popeye’s muscular nemesis, Bluto. Colvig’s quarrel with Disney was brief. He returned in 1940, and remained there for the rest of his career.

Colvig was more than a voice artist. He was a gold mine of animation smarts – an oldtimer in a new medium. He had produced and directed the first full length color animated film, Pinto’s Prizma’s Comedy Revue, in 1919. Dennis and I don’t know much more about Vance Debar “Pinto” Colvig. He was the son of a Jackson County judge, and entered show business first as a clown. He is famous for saying that he regarded animation as simply clowning on paper.

During his brief stay at Fleischer Brothers, Colvig took the lead role of Gabby, the Lilliputian watchman, in their first feature length animated film, Gulliver’s Travels.

In 2010, composer Galen Huckins selected Gulliver’s Travels as Filmusik’s seventh project.

Q: What is Filmusik?

A: Based out of Portland, Oregon. Filmusik is a collaborative performance group of musicians, composers and actors creating a unique movie experience by performing a new soundtrack for classic films live in the pit.

If you’re having a hard time imagining this, here’s my advice.

Just go see them do it.

Gulliver’s Travels will be screened  with a brand new score, and live voice artist performances, at the Hollywood Theatre, July 16 at 7:00 PM, July 18 at 2:00 PM, July 21 at 7:00 PM and July 23 at 7:00 PM.

Buy tickets here.

Hey, there’s more Oregon connections!

Jim Blashfield turned Michael Jackson into a modern day Gulliver, strapped to the ground by his adoring fans, in Leave Me Alone, his highly regarded and deeply influential 1989 music video.

Leave Me Alone was made here in Portland, at  Blashfield’s studio, with the exception of the footage of Michael Jackson, which was shot in LA.

This post brought to you by Oregon Cartoon Institute.

From one of Walt Curtis‘ notebooks.

PART ONE, PORTLAND

Walt calls me up. “Anne, there’s a reading at Powell’s tonight. Do you want to go?” Hazel Hall was an invalid who wrote tiny jewel-like poems about the clothes she embroidered for rich people. She wrote poems about the people she saw walking past her window, about the sound of rain, about the sight of her own hands in moonlight. I want to hear her poems like I want a hole in the head. But I say yes. We get there and Walt, walking with his characteristic weave, escorts me to the only two empty seats. Walt’s unsteady walk is present all the time, making it difficult to tell when he is drunk and when he isn’t. As if in recognition of the confusion this can create, he occasionally produces a clarifying statement, such as “I’m drunk”, whenever this does happen to be the case. That he is able to state this fact without guilt or defiance, without self-pity or implied invitation – this is one of the Seven Wonders of Walt. Walt pulls a copy of the new anthology from his pocket and silently underlines for me the lines which are his favorites with his thumb. One poem is coming at me from the podium, another one is being presented to me as a personal present by Walt. I see that the readers defer to Walt in their body language, and I am puzzled as to why this should be the case. True, Walt is a poet, but several other writers so identified are gathered in that room. I know this, since Walt whispers this information to me when they rise to read. Finally one of the readers, a young woman, thanks Walt directly for introducing her to Hall’s work. As the evening progresses, other speakers repeat her tribute. Hall died in 1924, and was completely forgotten when Walt picked up one of her books from a dusty box in Goodwill.  It was Walt, I learn, who, by writing about her, speaking about her, and advocating for the memorial which now stands in front of her house, inspired the renaissance of interest which resulted in the book which led to this reading. It is Walt, who does not teach writing (as does one reader), nor seek tenure (as does the editor of the anthology), nor write plays (what the young woman who thanked him does – she wrote one about Hall), who brought us all here tonight.  I have learned to let Walt drag me places.

Walt calls me up. “There’s an opening night party at Mark Woolley Gallery. Do you want to go?” I get there before he does. I wander from painting to painting. They are on black velvet, or what the gallery notes call “the luminous velvet painting medium”. All are portraits of the Black Velvet Woman. Arnold Pander loves the Black Velvet Woman, and paints her with a reverential respect. You know the tradition as well as I do. The Black Velvet Woman’s black velvet flesh is separated from the black velvet universe in which she eternally floats only by a thin glowing line of paint. She is always naked. She always has a slightly hungry expression on her face. Her nipples stick up but she is never cold. Illuminated by moonlight, she waits for you to come to her. But I know I am putting off what I really came to see. I brace myself and enter the second room.

I enter just as Marne Lucas, the other artist in the show, and the first known pornographer I have ever wittingly laid eyes upon, clatters past me. She is in her early thirties, and the first thing I notice about her is that she looks tired. She is an established erotic photographer, a career she pursues in tandem with her work as a model for fetish magazines, but she has never shown in a gallery before, so she is everywhere – introducing people and being hugged.

The last thing I expect of a pin up model is exhaustion. I know how women look in men’s magazines look – like soft, firm gumdrops.

They look out at you with trusting expressions, seemingly unaware that their clothes are in the process of becoming, right before your eyes, much too small for them. Really naughty pictures are of girls who look like they know what is going on. But most wear the same expression you see on a freshly baked cake. I knew instinctively, even at age ten, going through my brother’s Playboy magazines, that the virginal bakery cake girls were the ones to emulate. In real life, where the proportion seemed to be the exact inverse of what was portrayed in my brother’s magazines, it was the innocent ones were in short supply. I hoped someday to number myself among them. I harbored the dream that one day I would find a gumdrop in the mirror looking back at me. Secretly, I despaired of ever becoming that innocent. I was already regularly reading the Playboy sex advice column. I read about the insatiability of women, in particular I read about the hazards of too much oral sex (“be careful, she may become dependent on it”). I was rapidly becoming as world weary as Marlene Dietrich. Who ever heard of an exhausted gumdrop? And yet here, thirty six years later, was the first professional gumdrop I ever saw in person, and that is exactly how she looked.

THINGS THAT GROW

by Hazel Hall

I like things with roots that know the earth,

Trees whose feet, nimble and brown,

Wander around in the house of their birth

Until they learn, by growing down,

To build with branches in the air;

Ivy-vines that have known the loam

And over trellis and rustic stair,

Or old grey houses, love to roam;

And flowers pushing vehement heads,

like flames from fire’s hidden glow,

through the seething soil in garden beds.

Yet I, who am forbidden to know

the feel of the earth, once thought to make

Singing out of the heart’s old cry?

Untaught by the earth how could I wake

The shining interest of the sky?

PART TWO, WILLIAMSBURG

My friend Andy takes me to a party in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn. We arrive with Andy’s nerves already shot because the group of twentysomethings we travelled with felt compelled to dicuss, a bit too loudly for Andy’s taste, their (white) impressions of the (black) housing project through which they had to pass. The loft is packed. The entertainment begins. A woman takes the stage.

She is naked. She blows up a sex doll, and begins having rough abusive sex with it, taking the role of the man. Her boyfriend sits in the front row, radiating pleasure. After this, a couple takes the stage. The woman is covered with balloons. She plays toreador, as her husband, on all fours, plays the bull, popping the balloons using his horns. Now she is naked. He continues to charge her. She stabs him and stabs him with her picador, until she draws blood.

“Real blood?“ I whisper to Andy, incredulous. I regard these party game playing twentysomethings as hopelessly, frighteningly decadent. I regard them all as trapped inside the house, watching life through a glass. They are so young. Why are they so lecherous?

PART THREE, PORTLAND

There is no question that Lucas’ photographs are sexy. They are designed to reach inside your pants and turn you on, and they do. The defining rule of engagement in porn is that the act of photography is itself a type of sex, with the camera an ever ready, ever busy, ever curious phallus. Of course this is true in other types of photography as well, but in pornography it is overt. The model sees the camera, the convention goes, and what she wants to do is come. As I walk around Mark Woolley Gallery, I see Lucas’ work falls well within this rule. In the gallery notes she writes that she uses porn ”as a platform for sexual narrative detailing tension and arousal” and she does this, but without recourse to several standard porn conventions, a feat similar to building an atom bomb without uranium. She takes the idea of mystery, so fundamental to the Black Velvet Woman’s allure, and throws it out the window. She shoots, for the most part, without using a flash. She uses, for the most part, totally recognizeable locations. She is not interested in turning her models into idealized icons of desire. The whole idea of sneaking a forbidden look, so fundamental to the appeal of bakery cake gumdrops, is completely absent. Lucas’ women fully realize a) they are undressed b) they are being photographed. It is impossible to leer at them. At least one or two of them have been caught in the act of leering at themselves.

Walt finally arrives. He is instantly swallowed up by the many other people in the gallery who are just as glad to see him as I am. Walking six feet in front of Walt is his tiny imperious girlfriend Marjorie, and her consort, a Guatemalan girl. Marjorie knows that Walt hangs out with me, and she chooses to ignore me as she sweeps by. She nods in response to my hello, but basically, to Marjorie, I do not exist. I like this about her. Walt has told me that Marjorie is his girl, and I like that he has one, especially one as terrifying regal as this. I watch for her reaction as she passes Lucas’ photographs (of young women minus their undies, tying up their fetish boots, quietly contemplating their own arousal) since she at one time worked as a stripper. In Alaska, Walt tells me in a protective, confidential tone, as if that explains everything. It does. Portland women do this. Courtney Love stripped in Alaska before stripping in Japan. But Marjorie barely glances at the pictures of naked and semi-naked women. She moves straight to the bar.

In one photograph, a young woman stands beside an extremely expensive car. She is fully dressed and looking down at the hood of the car where she has gently rested the end of the fake penis she has on. In another, a young woman holds the yogic pose of the Tortoise. All we see is her naked, serene, moon-like bottom. Her high heels are crossed beneath her. I like this one best. Walt likes the one with the penis. He is gay, or identifies himself as gay. In PECKERNECK POET, the documentary Bill Plympton made about Walt, Marjorie is one of the women who surround him as he reads a poem about his horror of being forced to have sex with them. After the poem, Marjorie grabs him for a kiss, which he returns. She says to the camera “He’s not gay.” I am fascinated by Walt’s multiple lives.

Walt’s poetry has two subjects: nature and sex. No one writes about the celestial quality of Portland cloudscapes like Walt, (although Gus Van Sant has photographed them) or the oversaturated fecundity of the forests, or the mild spiritual temperament of the mountains. Walt writes about cows, about geese, about carrots growing in his garden. He also writes about his own erections, and the people who inspire them.

I wait on the sidewalk outside Mark Woolley Gallery, thinking over the exhibit. At one point, a stunning blonde girl entered the room. I watch her scan the crowd, oblivious that all eyes are turned upon her. I have seen this happen before. Once a young woman got on the subway who was so beautiful everyone dropped all pretense at protocol and openly gaped. Before this miraculous apparition, we fell to our collective knees. It was a group decision. She modestly studied her own lap for the entire length of her ride. Another time I saw a beautiful woman make her way (OK, she was being escorted by Alec Baldwin) into a crowded New York movie theater. We parted for her instinctively. I remember thinking “Now that’s a beautiful woman!” even though all I saw was her hair, fanned out across a bulky winter coat. If a woman is beautiful enough, you do this. You get out of her way. You don’t do it because she is Kim Basinger, you do it because some part of you, over which you have no sovereignty, has crowned her Queen of Heaven. Marne Lucas runs to the young woman and they embrace, in a flurry of elbows. Walt appears at my side, admiring the new arrival. “Isn’t she gorgeous? I’d like to be her agent.” he says to me with admirable honesty and uncharacteristic greed.

It is tribute to the great beauty of Lucas’ little sister that Walt would say something so unlike himself. Walt, no slouch himself in the photographic good looks department, doesn’t even bother to sell his own books. He gives them away, as if they were zucchinis. Once I received a horrified note from him reminding me that I should have asked five dollars for copies of hisbook, Mala Noche, which I sold my class in preparation for his visit. That’s one third of the price the publisher listed on the back cover. He wrote that in ignoring these instructions and collecting full price, I had offended him deeply. He wanted everyone to have a book. He instructed me to pay each student back, and included the cash with which to do it.

Marne Lucas’ step-father stands, drink in hand, looking pleased, proud and a little uncomfortable. We learn Marne Lucas’ little sister is a freshman at Portland State, and that she recently made the soccer team. Henk Pander, Arnold’s father, joins us, and as I stand between them, I cannot escape the feeling, that I have suddenly stepped from a porn gallery into a PTA meeting.

Vincente Guzman Orozco arrives, throwing off his jacket as he makes his entrance. I query him about his reaction to the show. “Oh,” he says, flashing an enormous smile and drawing tiny circles around his own nipples, “I find it very titillating.”

PART FOUR, PORTLAND

If there is one thing Portland is good at, it is producing people who take one step back and examine sex as part of their professional lives. This is the town where Ursula Le Guin stayed home smoking her pipe and writing THE LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS while her husband worked needlepoint. This is the town where Sallie Tisdale wrote TALK DIRTY TO ME, where Callie Khouri wrote THELMA & LOUISE. This is the town where Chuck Palaniuk wrote FIGHT CLUB, Larry Colton wrote GOAT BROTHERS, and Gus Van Sant wrote MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO.

I am sitting in a Church of Christ Scientist temple, now converted to a children’s theater, listening to Susie Bright answer questions from the audience after giving a cheerful talk about the importance of recognizing the individuality of your own sexual fantasies. The first question from the floor was “Aren’t you a lesbian anymore?” She forthrightly admits to living with a man, and adds that categories are slippery. The second question was “Do you think it is possible for someone to have sexual relationships which are ongoing, loving, and committed, with more than one person at a time?” This one stumps her only briefly. She starts to answer it in the affirmative, but cautions that she has never seen it last. Immediately hands shoot up, and various groups of Portlanders identify themselves as involved in long term happily polyamorous relationships. I see Susie Bright’s jaw drop. I see the thought racing across her mind: am I in another time zone? The question is: is it ahead? Or behind?

Walt is across the street from Mark Woolley Gallery, trying to retrieve two Russian immigrant teenage boys from the garage where they work. I am on the sidewalk waiting for him to give up. He thinks they should see the show. He explains this to one boy, who goes to get the other. The other boy comes, and Walt explains it to him. He goes to get his father. Walt knows the father, knows the whole family. While I wait, I am talking with a friend of Walt’s who is sitting on a bench outside the gallery. Walt had greeted him joyfully, telling him he looked awfully healthy. “Why wouldn’t I be?”, the man said, making the motion as if he was pumping iron. “I just got out.” He tells Walt  the State of Oregon recently pulled the plug on an experimental co-ed prison.  I asked him “So, was it different?”  “Completely different.” he said. “All the guys are walking around lovesick. No one wants to get out.”

For sheer multiplicity of utopian vision, there is nothing like life in Oregon. In Oregon, a person deeply intrigued by the idea of men and women behind bars together can make it happen. Oregon is a place where you can take a chance. You can try something out. Marne Lucas was deeply intrigued by the idea that a woman could be photographed aroused by her own fantasies. If you want to see female sexuality, why look at pictures documenting male fantasies? If you want a close look at Eve, why cover her up with fig leaves? Lucas proposes to take you straight to the Garden. She pours the new wine of empowerment in the old wineskin of pornography. Why not? She can make it happen. Someone in Oregon thought it would be a good idea to open a 24 hour coin-operated Church of Elvis. Someone in Oregon thought it would be a good idea to be able to vote without leaving your house. Someone in Oregon thought it would be a good idea if the patient retained final authority in the decision to prolong or end life. Someone in Oregon thought running shoes could be improved if you stuck them very briefly into a waffle iron.  There is something in the sleepiness of life in Oregon which makes the dream of utopia so strong that once it overtakes a person it must be acted upon. Either that, I think darkly to myself, clutching onto my responsibilities as a skeptical visiting New Yorker, or the awareness of evil, supplying the dark background we have always needed to in order to see things clearly, has atrophied.

PART FIVE, PORTLAND

It is raining and Bob forgot his umbrella. He is rattled. We are having breakfast at a delicatessen in Northwest Portland. I like Bob, and once offered myself to him as a girlfriend. He turned me down flat, and we soldiered on as friends. He arrived in Portland years ago, a gentle Jesus with a pony tail who built geodesic domes. Now he is a judge. This morning Bob is upset by three things: the umbrella he doesn’t have, the allergy medicine he left at home, and the distressing number of young women he sees who are unacquainted with the most basic precepts of feminism. He is upset that a young woman we both know has responded to a unplanned pregnancy by marrying the father, who she just met, and preparing for motherhood. When you enter Bob’s apartment, the first thing you see is the framed certificate of appreciation from the National Abortion Rights Action League for the years of service he gave as president of the local chapter.

Bob is from the East Coast where the idea is to wait and have children when you are ready for them. In Oregon we don’t do this. This is one thing that hasn’t changed in the twenty-two years I have been away, raising my native born Oregonian daughter to be a New Yorker. In Portland young women are still forging ahead and having babies they are not in the least bit ready for. They marry the fathers, or not. Later they will divorce them, or not. The baby is the thing. A baby on the hip is an advertisement of safe passage through late adolescence. We don’t give birth out of defiance; it is not that calculated. We do it as part of our exploration of our bodies. We don’t do it because we need love; we do it because we’re curious, we want to be strong, intuitive women at peace with our bodies, and we can’t be stopped. I don’t expect Bob to understand this, so I don’t try to explain it to him. Instead I listen as he explains why he is upset by the young woman’s decision. He feels cheated. I ask him why. He says he worked hard to give women freedom to choose. I say “Do you hear what you just said? Freedom to choose? You’re trying to choose for her!” Controlling a temper I have never seen before, he says “What – I’m not supposed to have a stake in this? Those were years out of my life. Years! For what?” “Bitches, cunts and whores.” I respond, helpfully. “Fuck you” he says, standing up and throwing down his napkin.

Walt finally returns from his errand across the street from the gallery. He is beaming, half-crazed with delight. “Do you see that?! I know those people. I know them! They used to have nothing!” He stops marveling at the garage owning Russian immigrants long enough to say goodbye to Eric Edwards, the cinematographer, who he didn’t get a chance to see inside the gallery. Eric tells Walt he is hard to get ahold of, something I know to be true from my own experience, and Walt profusely promises to look into getting an email address. Then Eric is gone and Walt turns back to me. He is calmer now, but still preoccupied with the success of the family across the street. He had met them years ago when their paths crossed in thrift stores where  they were always looking for furniture and he was scouting books. At that time, they were newly arrived in this country. The boys, now grown, were then small. Walt shakes his head, amazed. “It’s the American dream. Right there! Look at it!” I have heard this tone of voice before. It is the one he usually uses to order me to look at the moon. I tell him I am going home. He is not listening. “Anne” he says, “our country is very great. Don’t let anyone tell you different.”

I am surprised to hear him say this. I have long thought Oregonians, who live in a region dominated by the second largest river on the continent, an absolute Amazon of biological abundance, to be somewhat less American than the rest of the country. In Oregon, life comes from decay, from different stages of death. Trees fall and the forest consumes them. Salmon return to give birth, and upon so doing, gasp their last. The result of this endless and grand wheel of destruction: more trees and more fish. There is no death; it is never over; it is always about to begin again. Oregon is the place where death can’t only kill you once, it can kill you over and over and over again. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness take place against this larger backdrop. This is what makes Oregonians open to trying new ideas. They are open to failure. Why? Because it doesn’t exist. Its never going to stop raining.

SALMON BOY

by Walt Curtis

Naked boy is on a spiritual trip.

He rides the backs of red

spawning fish, acrobat of water

and air. The river runs forever;

salmon will return again and again.

The hook of the crescent moon

invites danger on the journey.

Salmon boy’ll be reborn.

He is me.

=====================================================================

This is from an unpublished article I wrote about my return to Portland in 2000. I publish it here in honor of Walt Curtis’ 69th birthday.

In honor of summer, Oregon Movies, A to Z is cutting back on work hours.

To fend off the feeling that readers are being left stranded, I am going to run a series of re-posts, arranged by theme. So don’t hold your breath, but there will be posts going up here — just on a much reduced schedule.

Mike Richardson became a film producer by way of comic book publishing. Not the conventional route, but a very successful one!

He credits his success as a publisher with being able to attract top talent, and he credits his ability to attract top talent to his willingness to allow the artists and writers who collect royalties from Dark Horse publications to have open access to the company books which track their earnings.

His “artist first” approach has worked pretty well.

Richardson currently has fourteen (14) projects in pre-production, three  (3) in post production, and a filmography that contains twenty two (22) titles. Here’s something you don’t see in LA: when he came to speak at Stumptown Comics Festival in 2009, he brought his mother with him.

Richardson grew up here and graduated from Portland State University, where he studied art. These credentials are similar to the ones held by Bill Plympton, another Oregon filmmaker who likewise steered his way to success by doing everything completely differently from everyone else.

Dark Horse Comics founder Mike Richardson is being given a (super)hero’s welcome in the hometown he never left. From June 18  to June 23,  JC Lillie Performing Arts Center (11300 SE 23rd Avenue in Milwaukie) hosts an exhibit of original comic art boards and memorabilia from Richardson’s personal collection of original art by some of the most well known comic book artists in the world.

Here’s more information. The exhibit will be up for only one week.

Mike Richardson entered Oregon film history when he executive produced his first film, pretty much in his own backyard. He must have liked the work. Since that time, he has collected an impressive set of Hollywood credentials.

Starstruck Oregonians who want to hobnob with Richardson (no relation)  get a chance on June 19, when he will give a personal tour of the Hometown Superhero exhibit. Tickets here.

The post brought to you by Oregon Cartoon Institute.

Dennis Nyback (second from right)  hangs out with Jack Stevenson (far left), who wrote about him, and his unusual career,  in Land of a Thousand Balconies.

Tomorrow Portland film archivist Dennis Nyback packs up a few of his programs and goes to Seattle for a week’s run at the Grand Illusion Cinema. All film, no video!

Dennis Nyback’s Panorama of the 20th Century (Grand Illusion, June 11-17)

The Grand Illusion welcomes back Northwest archivist and historian Dennis Nyback and his eclectic collection of films for this weeklong series. Mr. Nyback, along with his encyclopedic knowledge and insouciant charm, will be your host, guiding you through his entertaining, offbeat version of the 20th century.

Terrorism Light and Dark
Friday June 11, 7pm
A revealing program of cartoons, short films and propaganda clips displaying America’s schizophrenic view of terrorism before 9/11. It includes the Cold War US Government film, What You Need to Know About Biological Warfare and Buster Keaton’s Cops.

Obama Technocrat?
Friday June 11, 9pm
Our president has been called a Technocrat. Huh? Technocracy was a social and political movement of the Jazz Age. Modern life had become too complicated for politicians to control—scientists should be in charge. It was laughed off the scene in the thirties. Since then, many Technocracy ideas have moved into the mainstream. One of their ideas was that energy should replace money as coin of the realm. Conserve energy to get rich! Our show goes back to the Zenith and Nadir of the movement: 1933. Titles include: Techno-Cracked, Techno-crazy, The Inventors, The Kid From Borneo, and more.

Battle of the Sexes
Saturday June12, 7pm
A look at the war between men and women in a program of short films and TV ads from 1934 to 1980. Of special interest to anyone who thinks there wasn’t a need for the feminist movement in the sixties.

The Open Road
Sunday June 13, 7pm
What is the myth and reality of America’s long love affair with the automobile? This program contains both and it’s only a ninety-minute ride at 36 feet per minute. The myth includes carefree vacations, the joy of hitchhiking, long haul trucker warriors of the road, carefree bikers on their hogs, leaving the driving to Greyhound and more. The reality includes being busted for drunk driving, becoming one of the tens of thousands a year who die in a horrible wreck, ending up a quadriplegic after a ride on a Harley, and road rage turning a mild mannered milquetoast into a vengeful maniac!

Hobo, You Can’t Ride That Train
Sunday June 13, 9pm
Mr. Nyback rode freight trains around the USA during his college years. This collection of hobo films looks at the reality and myth of hobos and train riding.

Industrial Design and Refrigerator Fetish
Monday June 14, 7pm
This show has been commissioned by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in SF to kick off their Industrial Design show in July. You get it first. An inside look at the beauty of the creation of utilitarian devices. Included is a rhapsodic look at four refrigerators from 1955, silent men in the 1920’s polishing, and polishing, and polishing, some unknowable object, everything you’d ever want to know about the design and production of a pencil, and much more.

Food: Is it for You?
Monday June 14, 9pm
Short films about food. A hit a Mr. Nyback’s Pike Street Cinema in 1993. Even more timely now. Short films about food. Isn’t that of interest to everyone?

Hillbillies in Hollywood
Tuesday June 15, 7pm
Outsider music from the black and white era. Hillbillies, Cowboys, Hawaiian, and unclassifiable musical acts from J. Harold Murray in 1927 to Hank Williams Jr. in 1964. In between wonderful performers singing, dancing, and playing banjos, ukuleles, saws, spoons, harmonicas, washboards, hootenannies, and more. Whoop Di Do!

Behind the Scenes in Hollywood
Tuesday June 15, 9pm
More inside stuff. This time a look behind the camera in Hollywood! From the 1930’s to the 1970’s. Early examples of the first sound cameras, songwriters Mack Gordon and Harry Revel struggling to write a song Lyda Roberti, Daffy Duck trying to get Porky Pig to resign from making cartoons for Leon Schlesinger, secrets of James Bond’s Aston Martin automobile, and much more.

Kill a Commie for Christ
Wednesday June 16, 7pm
Rare government films from the cold war era. Mushroom Clouds! Radioactive Fallout! Dirty Godless Ruskies! America with God on its side! It’s all here. Could it happen again? You be the judge.

Primer on the Ku Klux Klan
Wednesday June 16, 9pm
Since the election of Barack Obama there has been a resurgence of enrollment in, and activity of, the Ku Klux Klan. This program features a jaw dropping CBS Special Report on the Klan from 1965. Back then the Klan was reacting to the landmark Voting Rights Act. The program starts with an Our Gang short from 1923, Lodge Night, in which the Little Rascals form their own club, the Cluck Cluck Clams.

I Know Why You’re Afraid
Thursday June 17, 7pm
A program of educational films that should never have been shown to impressionable children! Included are the darkly hilarious bus safety film, Death Zones (1975), an excerpt from the drivers ed shocker, Mechanized Death (1961) and many more macabre films that do much to explain our culture’s paranoia.

The Mormon Church Explains It All to You
Thursday June 17, 9pm
In the 1950’s the Mormon Church started making educational films. Seen by students throughout the country, they combined excellent film making skill with very unusual ideas. This is the cream of the crop of their prodigious output. A most entertaining program!

You tell me. Is there a better city in which to hold the 54th convention of the AAEC?  Why not come straight to the source, to the state which produced both Homer Davenport and Jack Ohman?

Homer Davenport, born in Silverton in 1867, was the second American editorial cartoonist to win superstar status, after Thomas Nast. Jack Ohman has been picking up the slack since then.

While they are here, I imagine more than a few conventioneers will sneak out of their symposiums to visit the Robert Crumb exhibit at Portland Art Museum. The more scholarly Crumb fans, who realize that Crumb’s Book of Genesis was directly inspired by Basil Wolverton’s Story of Man, should get  special kick out of seeing that work right here, where Basil walked the streets.

Although not an editorial cartoonist, Basil also published in the Oregonian.

Thanks to Mr. Ohman for sending me this alert! We’re making him an honorary member of the Oregon Cartoon Institute.