Honestly, and not that you’ve asked, but Facebook drives me crazy. It did lead me to think that “moral omniscience and historical ignorance go hand in hand”, and I do love a pithy phrase. Still, it’s depressing to watch, and I’ve just about bitten my tongue clean off. It’s also fascinating, and hard to look…
Category: Eugene
Thinking the Unthinkable
A couple weeks back I showed up at the usual watering hole, at the usual time, but the usual crowd wasn’t there. Or rather, the usual crowd was only partly there – and the part that was there was all male. Usually, the crowd is female dominant, not just in number, but in organization. It…
The Triumph of Poetic Truth
Listen Up Normies, Your World is Ending I’m still trying to understand the pussy hat. I’m familiar with Trump’s grab ’em by the pussy remark, and I understand that pussy might also refer to a cat. So, ok, a pink hat that vaguely suggests cat ears. But what the fuck does it mean to wear…
Progress, for Better and Worse
I was at a wine and poetry gathering the other night, where a young woman of Jewish descent offered a traditional sung blessing. She prefaced it by saying that the meaning of the Hebrew was to offer thanks to God for the wine, but that as she didn’t believe in any sort of external divinity,…
Back to the Hall of Mirrors
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Facebook about how, if the Mueller probe didn’t produce an indictment to validate the long-standing belief among the #Resistance that Trump was a puppet of Putin, the whole thing would prove a disaster for said #Resistance. A friend of mine commented that even if Trump were…
Talking Shit to Power
EW’s Molly Templeton is the perfect reviewer for movies like the new ‘Star Wars’. Perfect, because she takes the relentless, transparent, and utterly contrived moralizing of these films as if they were deep expressions of eternal truth. She has the willing naiveté of a good childhood playmate, except she’s an adult, and this movie is…
The Bitter Pill #9: The Phantom Menace
Dismantling the Fascist Takeover of Eugene If you’re a resident of Eugene, you might not have noticed that your home town was a “hotbed of emboldened white nationalism”, “overcome” by neo-nazis summoned into being by the shocking election of Donald Trump. Don’t let the thousands of people who showed up in support of the second…
The Bitter Pill #8: Deconstructing the EW’s Response to Recent Criticism of their Workplace Culture
They said it couldn’t be done! Wait… no, they said it shouldn’t be done. Anyway, I did it. What follows is a line-by-line exegesis of the Eugene Weekly’s official response to scathing public criticisms of the behavior of management from several former employees. The text may have been edited since I copied it for this…
Prophets of DOOM!!!
The Bitter Pill #7 Kelly Kenoyer’s list of some of the “myriad reasons” for impeaching Trump does a good job of demonstrating how lacking the EW’s case for impeachment is in the sort of substance that might serve as common ground across ideological lines. “Our Institutions Won’t Save Us,” as Baynard Woods’ article in the…
Make Music, Not War
Had a great time playing outside 16 Tons last night with Zac. It is such a pleasure to play with a soloist, especially an exceptionally skilled and musical one, because it allows me to switch between leading and supporting, and in so doing to enter more fully into the experience of the music and the…
You Say You Want A Revolution
A letter written to the Eugene Weekly in response to their report titled Setting Terms After Charlottesville What does Naomi Strawser suggest we do with the “known neo-Nazis [living] comfortably within our boundaries”? Seize their property by eminent domain? Criminalize their thought and speech so we can lock them up? Hound them into fleeing? Form…
Another Week, Another Weekly
Unlike my friend David, who used to study film, but now finds it beneath contempt, my appetite for the medium remains undiminished. Well, not exactly. I’m not so interested in films, per se, but in the whole act of dramatic representation. Consequently, I’m particularly interested in movie reviews. I’m of the old school, what Hamlet…
The Best of the Worst
Reading the EW’s “Socializing with Socialists” article from last week, it struck me that the problem with being anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist, and all similar things is that the negation of hierarchy does not in itself solve the problem of hierarchy. Hierarchy, in short, reasserts itself, covertly at first, and then again in the fresh bloom…
The Purpose of Players
I confess that Rick Levin’s feature article on the OSF prompted me to look up lumpenproletariat. Having done so, I’m pretty sure he misapplied the term. While Wikipedia is hardly an infallible source, the definition given there seems well-founded: “a term … originally coined by Marx to describe the layer of the working class that…
The Eugene Weekly Takes on Fake News
THE BITTER PILL #5 A fight to the death of journalism. I’m not at all surprised that Camilla Mortensen’s fake news buyer’s guide was a hodgepodge of vaguely related ideas and platitudes. On the other hand, the hectoring tone of her opening did come as a shock. Rather than a photo of NPR’s Elizabeth Jensen,…
Very Much Like a Newspaper
The Bitter Pill #4 I have to hand it to the Weekly: it looks just like a newspaper. They seem to have gotten a firm handle on the whole matter of arranging words according to the familiar pattern of Headline, Sub-Heading and body text. The illusion suckers me in most every time. Even though I’ve…
Don Kahle, Man of the Future
Whenever the stresses of the real world start to get me down, I feel comforted by the certain knowledge that Friday’s RG will provide another of Don Kahle’s inspiring flights outside the box of common sense. Whether he’s sucking up to a local official, implicitly identifying himself with the cultural elite, or just drawing an…
Say No to Kangaroo Courts
UO professor Michael Hames-Garcia is against official censure of unpopular speech and actions, solely because such censure has historically fallen disproportionately on “women, people of color and queer people.” In his mind, there is nothing intrinsically “chilling” about censuring controversial speech. Rather, he’s concerned that censure in the hands of an institution, like the University,…
Make Cosplay, Not War
The Bitter Pill #3 I’ve been on a real rollercoaster lately. After completing Bitter Pill #2, I started developing a gnawing feeling that maybe spending so much time thinking and writing about the Eugene Weekly was a form of mental illness, or at least a serious defect in character. A good friend, albeit of the…
The Best Idea Whose Time Has Come
I appreciate all the Weekly has done this year to render its annual Best of issue as a farce. Opening with a profusion of randomly conceived Staff Picks goes a long way to exploding whatever illusions anyone might have that EW is in contact with some means of objectively, or essentially, determining what is “best”. However, in an age where an…
The Coffee Chronicles #2
Well, we can cross The Barn Light off the list of potential spots to get coffee as it used to be, in the World Before April. I stopped in there last week on a walkabout through wild Downtown Eugene, the Greatest City in the World for Arts and the Outdoors. The barista was, she informed…
Don Kahle’s Pompous Idiocy Must End
An as yet unsuccessful proposal to Eugene’s Register Guard I might feel more forgiving toward Don Kahle’s failings as a writer if he weren’t such a pompous ass to boot. Every time I come across his work in Friday’s RG he is dropping some name or other, in the course of criticizing Eugene for being…
Hungry Ghosts and the Real Meaning of Halloween
While considering a friend’s avoidance of trick or treaters I was struck by the essence of Halloween, which has been lost, though the form lives on. It used to be if you didn’t show up at the door with offerings the kids would vandalize your house, but we’re living in a soft age, with no real…
Suck it up, Bitches!
And by “Bitches” I mean white, heterosexual, men with dicks, and possibly beards, too You might have wondered how it is that the Eugene Weekly can derisively refer to some musicians as “white guys with beards and dicks”; how columnist Sally Sheklow can declare that straight men smile “like they have spinach in their teeth”;…