Concert Alert: Band of Horses

When: Wednesday Nov. 21st
Where: Crystal Ballroom, 8pm.
Tickets: www.tickermaster.com

Tickets are still available and relatively cheap ($17 before fees.) I'm going with a bunch of friends, if you decide you're interested let me know and we'll rock out together :)

Only in PDX: Puppet Drive-By

I had to run an errand before class this morning, so I ended up walking to campus heading North through the Park Blocks instead of South. I got to Mill and was waiting to cross, when my thoughts become drowned out by Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive." I turned to my right to see... a puppet. Driving a minivan. Actually it was a Plymouth Voyager, and he wasn't driving because the van was at a stop. There was no visible human in the car, just a small monkey puppet hanging out the driver's side window, staring at me intently while playing air drums. I stood awe-struck for a good 40 seconds until he abruptly disapeared back into the van, and the van peeled out on Mill then headed back down 9th.

I couldn't even make this shit up.

Best of / Worst of PDX: McMenamins

For those of you that don't know, McMenamins is a magical little chain of Oregon-based pubs that's also expanded into pub-based hotels and concert venues, such as the Crystal Ballroom. Usually they're located inside of older, established buildings with some history; the Edgefield Hotel, for instance, use to be a poor farm owned by the State of Oregon. Many an orphan once toiled the fields that now offer an 21-hole golf course, or a full-service salon. When someone who's never been to Oregon before comes into town, you can take them to McMenamins and feel like you're giving them a fair glimpse of the state's laid-back attitude, small-business economy, and pretty, hippie murals everywhere. But the McMenamins experience itself is completely mediocre at best, often times frustrating and severely over-rated, something one inevitably discovers after living within proximity of McM's for a few years and having a "Communication Breakdown" burger frighteningly undercooked more times than you can count. In trying to assess to better explain the true idea of this strange anomaly of a business, I have discovered the 5 essential truths of McMenamins:

I. If you want to get a burger after work and you don't want fast food, nor desire to sit within the confines of an Applebee's, or worse, a Red Robin, where else can you go? McMenamins. And it's kind of like a bar but not, so you don't feel bad when you order those first few beers, and it's all downhill from there. But you know that. Point being, McMenamins is convenient and relatively cheap when compared to other casual dining businesses in Portland.

II. McMenamins also offers a fairly generic selection of food on their menu. There's burgers, a few salads or vegan options for the hippies, something vaguely ethnic but equally non-partisan in its appeal, (a burrito, maybe some fettuccine), etc. When you're discussing the after-work plans with your friends, and one of them says, "I could really go for a burger," and the other says, "Really? I could really go for a black bean and tofu burrito," McMenamins has already solved the problem of finding a destination that satisfies both palates.

III. Unfortunately, McMenamins knows that they are cheap, convenient and easy to put in your mouth. And they realize that there are few similar alternatives in the Portland metro area to their restaurant.

IV. Given this knowledge, McMenamins wants you to know the following, too: your food order is never going to be delivered correctly, on time, and definitely not with a smile. And you need to be ok with this.

V. In the mean time you are expected to consume their mediocre beer or their crappy wine (sorry, but DUDE, come on), because those products, much like McMenamins, are also convenient and cheap, and only slightly better than what you'd be able to go out and find on your own. You may also amuse yourself by wandering throughout the facility and staring at all the bitchin' hippie murals on the wall, or perhaps read one of the 4,296 pamphlets on your table about that specific pub, Lodging at Hotel Oregon, Weddings at McMenamins, the History of Edgefield, Waiting for an Hour to Get Your Shitty Terminator Stout at the Blue Moon, or the American Folk Music Tour at The Grand Lodge.

The truth hurts because it's true: WE are the reason McMenamins is like this. We are the ones that take the perpetual beating of shitty service, mediocre food and a staff that obviously was not required to pass any sort of drug test.

But like any other abusive relationship there's an element of love with McMenamins, too. If I want to go somewhere I can just be left alone, and sit at a table disturbed by a waitress only twice over a two-hour course of time, I go to McMenamins. If there's the possibility of more than 12 people arriving at the same place, I know I can pull enough tables together at Ringlers or the Backstage Bar to accommodate said group. Of course, this is all knowledge I gathered over a lengthier period of time much further beyond my maiden voyage to the North Bank. And even though I eventually learned equally shitty things about McMenamins, I came to understand it for what it was, and there was some beauty in that.

Having said that, I'm sitting inside the Ram's Head right now waiting for my Communication Breakdown burger, which I ordered 52 minutes ago. My Rubinator is flat and I'm pretty sure my waitress hates me. Don't bring your out-of-state friends to McMenamins, kids. Oregon needs all the street cred it can get.

Concert Alert: M.I.A., Thursday Nov. 15th

Yes, that's in 3 days, kids. Why are more people not going to this show?

Location: Roseland Theater, 7pm
Tickets: www.Ticketswest.com

She's a great live performer and probably won't be back on the west coast, let alone in America, for quite a while. YOU SHOULD BE THERE.

What Can Brown (Liquor) Do For You?

I got really drunk on whiskey the other night. It wasn't intentional. But that's the way that a whiskey drunk starts: you have a hard night at work, one of the cooks says he owes you a drink for snapping at you over a plate, and you think, "Gosh, a nice bourbon would taste good right now." It seems harmless, the perfect night cap. You imagine the warmth going down your throat and down to somewhere behind your diaphragm, like a pleasant sigh. "Yes," you think. "I will have a whiskey." Next thing you know it's last call at Dixie and the security guard is physically making you leave, but you don't care because you've got a stolen bottle of Jager in your backpack and there's a good chance that one of the fourteen people you drunk-dialed is going to call you back at any minute and offer to split it with you. (They don't.) What happens? Where does it go wrong? In an attempt to figure it out, I re-created the evening with a shitty map I found online then edited with Microsoft Paint, and talked to people I may or may not have seen/drunk-dialed/hung out with that evening.



I know for a fact that I started at Location #1, my place of work. My end-of-shift drink was a nice Knob Creek neat, and right as I was leaving I got pulled into the kitchen for a shot of Makers with the other girls. I then went to location #2, the Marathon Taverna, where I met one of my co-workers and friends of friends. Said co-workers owed me a drink, which I made a Makers neat with a side of coke. I honestly thought that this would be the best way to gage my alcohol intake, by being able to see exactly how much whiskey I was having. Somehow I momentarily forgot that I am yet to escape the college mentality of never wasting alcohol, and drank it all. And then I was like, "You know what? I should buy my friend a drink, too." Because this is how whiskey starts: she is a sweet, seductive lady. She takes away your stress and makes you nice, and you're magically transformed into the benevolent drunk who wants to buy everyone a drink. And then my newfound benevolence affected said co-worker, who bought me a drink for buying him a drink for buying me a drink. This pattern of selfless drunken reciprocity lasted the rest of the night.

At some point, it was decided that we were going to Thirsty Lion. In real life I only go there to watch soccer or get Boddington's on tap, but this was no longer real life: this was a full on whiskey drunk. And the reason I know this now, is because I did not know this at the time; four or five neat whiskeys in an hour had swayed me from just grabbing a quick drink after work to exploring downtown, on foot, with my backpack, completely wasted.

We get to Thirsty Lion, and there's a $4 cover and we bitch about paying and say something about just having got off work, and the bouncer says, "Yeah? Where do you work?" And we tell him, and he waves us in without paying. For some reason this moves us - like we have this deeply forged bond with everyone else who works in a bar in Portland. And we're like, "You know what? Let's drink this bar's liquor to repay their kindness." So co-worker goes up to the bar and buys the first round, and fifteen minutes later I buy the second. I run into a friend from the last bar I worked at, and have a conversation that I will later regret and blame on my big fucking mouth under the influence of whiskey. Damn it. At some point I go to the bathroom and hold the broken stall door closed for two girls that are friends and both have to pee, so they share a stall. I don't know if men know how common this is amongst drunk women, but it is. If you and your friend go to the bathroom together and there's a long line and you're both drunk and the stall is big enough for you to both stand in together, you do. It's like saying, "You're my friend, and I like you enough to pee in front of you so you can pee before all those other girls. We have that level of trust." So I helped two girls who had that level, and they thanked me and told me they liked my hair. So that was pretty cool.

When I got out of the bathroom my co-worker says that another girl we work with was at Barracuda, the shittiest, most awful place in all of Portland to find yourself on a Friday night. But our friend doesn't know this because she just moved to Portland, so the trip to Barracuda now takes on a slightly aggressive, re-con mission vibe, like, "We have to get her out of there!" This is the part where things get a little fuzzy for me, and I begin to time-travel, my consciousness emerging for only select moments of time, none of which are usually instances of good-decision making. This theme will emerge again, but we'll get to that later.

We get to Location #4, Barracuda, and I vaguely remember the old manager's name because he use to let me in when I was young and stupid and went to Barracuda twice. I ask if he's there, and they say he hasn't worked there for 8 months. Whoops. We make something else up - we were with CitySearch? - and the next thing I know we're inside, no cover, ID's not checked and no one thinks it's weird I have my school backpack with me. WHO THE FUCK LETS THIS HAPPEN AT THEIR BAR?!? I'll tell you who - the people who make this town magical. Thank you, staff of Barracuda. We go upstairs to the VIP section, which is completely closed, so we can call our friend and laugh at all the people below dancing to the terrible, terrible music. My co-worker tries to find our other co-workers, and I go to find booze. There's the upstairs bar, but it's completely closed. Mystified by this, I walk behind the bar and start looking for liquor, unaware that I'm doing something very, very bad. Everything is locked down... except for a mini fridge. I open it and find a combination of liqour that could only sound appealing when severely intoxicated: a fifth of Jager, 4 RockStars and a half-full bottle of Tuaca. At that moment, Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me," comes on, and I decide this is pretty much the most kick-ass night I could ever have at Barracuda. I take the bounty back to my friend, and we decide to pour the Tuaca in the RockStars, and take the Jager to ease the pain of having had to go into this terrible bar. Our friend that we were in search of ended up at a close contender for lamest bar in PDX, the Dixie Tavern, so Re-Con Mission Part Deux commences and we leave Barracuda.

From there, the following happens:
1) We arrive at Location #5, the Dixie Tavern and I do not remember being carded or made to pay a cover.
2) We find our friend upstairs, and she buys us drinks.
3) I try to tell her we don't need them and go to ask the bartender for cups for our bottle of Jager. Luckily co-worker #1 stops me, and our liquor is saved.
4) We try dancing very classy waltz-like dances with each other, including dips, and it does not work.
5) Lights come on and a security person is telling us to go downstairs and leave.
6) We decide to keep drinking, but our male co-workers has to walk his dog, so we'll go do that first and then go somewhere else for beer.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) it does not work this way. I think what happened was that our friend went to walk his dog, and came back and found us two girls asleep in his living room. Although I do think I remember some public-access television, not sure though. The next thing I do know is that it's light outside, and I am on a couch and there's a pitbull jumping on my bladder and it hurts. I go to the bathroom and my pee smells like whiskey. It's that bad. I don't feel the full breadth of my stupidity yet because I'm still slightly drunk. As I sit and try to piece together the events from the night before, I realize what happened: I made a series of bad decisions. Blatant, capital letter, Bad Decisions. I share this realization with my comrades, and they decide that my new nickname is "BDR" - Bad Decision R______. I can't really blame them - I mean, I don't even like Jager! And there it was, sitting in my friend's refrigerator while I wonder how was it that I remembered to take off my earring and hang them over the edge of my cowboy boots so I wouldn't lose them, but I have absolutely no memory of calling fourteen people in varying time zones? How does this happen?!

Whiskey. That's how.