Jack London, Socialism, and Occupy Portland

Jack London’s birthday is coming up in a few weeks. This January 12, 2012, would be the 136th anniversary of his birth in San Francisco, back in 1876 (the U.S. centennial, one may note).

There’s a basement bar here in Portland called the Jack London, downstairs from a venerable lounge on 4th Avenue known as the Rialto. (For many, many years -- until less than a decade ago, I believe -- the latter had a huge misspelled sign out front that identified it to passing drivers on 4th as the “Railto”; now that it has been corrected, I wish I had taken a photo of that.)

The Jack London Bar is not venerable; it opened only last June, although it took its name from an ancient, unlamented fleabag hotel at that location called the Jack London.

The bar has garnered decent Internet reviews for a mid-sized dance floor, laser lights, “makeout-friendly dark corners and couches,” and other nightclub amenities. But the management also has been collaborating with the Oregon Historical Society to host lectures on local history, culture, and celebrities.

Which is how I discovered the place: I dropped in on Nov. 8 to listen to a talk about Tom Burns, a Portland eccentric who owned a bookshop on West Burnside between 3rd and 4th avenues, and used to make speeches on street corners which got him repeatedly hauled in by the police for attacking city government and advocating socialism.

This experience was not unknown to the future author of The Call of the Wild and “To Build a Fire.” After a colorful youth that included long hours working in a cannery at age 13, making an illegal living as an oyster pirate a couple years later and then turning around and serving the law as an employee of the California Fish Patrol, serving on a ship to Japan at 17, getting busted for vagrancy in Buffalo and doing a month in a penitentiary after crossing the U.S. as a tramp, and bulling his way into UC Berkeley at 20, Jack London also made socialist speeches in public (in City Hill Park, Oakland) and got arrested for it.

Raking Leaves and Revolution

I ran into an acquaintance Thursday afternoon, the day my picture appeared in the local paper raking leaves at the Occupy Portland camp site Wednesday morning.

It had been 31 days since the police evicted the campers, and 31 days that the squares had been fenced off so that no one -- neither the Occupiers nor the general public -- could take a step into those downtown blocks.

The City Parks and Recreation Department had originally planned to let volunteers onto the site to rake leaves on Nov. 23, only 10 days after “eviction,” but recent rains had made the job much less feasible and appetizing, so the job was postponed.

Good thing it was; Portland had pretty much no rain the first two weeks of December, so by this last Wednesday the ground and dead foliage were pretty dry and manageable. Poetically, a light rain finally fell Wednesday evening, hours after we finished.

Getting Occupy on the Program

The ex-Marine had served four tours of duty in Iraq. I went up to him after the meeting and asked him, “Looking back on your military service, do you feel that you were defending liberty and freedom?”

“Absolutely not,” he replied. “That’s what radicalized me.” He now works with and speaks for a veteran-run, anarchist collective known as Rose City Resistance. There is a growing, committed anarchist movement of military vets, he continued. Sort of like recovering Catholics, I suggested; he grinned and nodded. When I told him I had recently seen an Internet graphic on Facebook that consists of a photo of soldiers in the field carrying a wounded comrade on a stretcher with the legend, “We were too busy defending your freedom to Occupy anything,” he almost growled.

I met this man Sunday afternoon in a meeting at the Ace Hotel, SW 10th and Stark, organized by The Bus Project and The Portland Mercury. The former is a volunteer-driven nonprofit that works to get young people involved in political activism, the latter an alternative free weekly newspaper. (The founder of The Bus Project, Jefferson Smith, currently a state representative for House District 47, is also running for mayor of Portland.) They had brought in legislative activists, community organizers, representatives from Mayor Sam Adams’s and U.S. Senator Merkley’s offices, and the vet and a self-described “1 percenter” to exchange ideas with Occupy Portland vets and sympathizers about future directions for the movement.

I’m not going to write about what we heard and talked about there . . . not because it was particularly pithy or deserves top-secret protection; like most Occupy and post-Occupy events, such as the MoveOn.org gathering at Senator Wyden’s office I wrote about in my last blog commentary, it was more about getting to know people, seeing a few familiar faces, and learning a couple useful things for future activity.

Occupy Forever!

It’s weird to feel nostalgia about something that happened only a few weeks ago.

I’m not talking about looking back on a great meal, or recalling a terrific vacation, or even contemplating the memory of a distant teenage kiss.

I’m talking about a big event, something far bigger than you or me and everyone we know; so big it made the nightly news and splashed all over the Internet and our social media networks for weeks on end. And we were a part of it. But now it’s gone and it’s like . . . history.

But it was only a few weeks ago.

That feels weird.

Thursday evening I went to a photo exhibition at a local gallery -- really, little more than a live-in, street-level loft. Quite appropriate for the contents, actually, which were 140 photos of the people, places, and events of Occupy Portland.

The photographer, Mark Kronquist, says he shot 12,000 images over the course of Occupy Portland’s downtown sojourn between October 6 and November 15. He also collected some signs and other mementoes from the camp, and hopes to turn it all over to the Oregon Historical Society (OHS).

Occupy Portland, part 10 - Was the Message Lost? And Who's the 99%?

Though things have grown quieter on the Occupy Portland front, the misleading news coverage goes on.

I checked the 11 o’clock editions of the local news Tuesday night, and though stormy winter weather had become the top story, more than one station reported that “Occupy Portland had cost the city $1.29 million in police overtime.” This of course is misleading, because the city committed those resources without ascertaining whether it really needed to. As this past weekend’s protests showed and I discussed in my last commentary, it may not have.

Among other things, the story in Tuesday’s Oregonian notes that the Police Bureau spent $4,000 in overtime in early September before police ever encountered any protesters -- “to prepare” to handle them, whatever that means. Lt. Robert King, a police spokesman, commented Tuesday that “Last weekend, we were able to pull back and they were able to march on the sidewalk and follow rules and laws….”

Actually, the police weren’t “able” to stop using so much manpower; they simply chose to give it a try, and found that it worked: “The bureau didn’t incur any overtime costs Saturday or Sunday.” It might have worked all along -- if the police bureau had been intelligent enough to attempt it sooner -- and saved much of the money the news stations said that “Occupy cost the city.”

Occupy Portland, part 9 - Latest News, and a Look at the Criticism

A little more than 24 hours ago, Portland Police Chief Mike Reese admitted that his assertion to the press Thursday, that a rape victim had been neglected because of the demands of policing Occupy Portland, was not exactly accurate.

Moreover, he acknowledged in the same Portland Police Bureau news release what I asserted in my last commentary: that all the police resources employed over the past five weeks (and all the overtime money that Occupy critics have been bleating about) -- especially over the last seven days -- might not have been necessary after all.

“Today, we tried something new,” the chief declared in yesterday’s statement. “Our Incident Commander … met with protesters before a march and asked if they wanted a police escort. When they told him no, he asked that they self-police their event and obey the law; police would only respond if there were complaints. The march participants agreed, and the event proceeded without any problems, or a police presence.”

The implicit message here, whether the chief will admit it on the record or not, is that the police were clearly a part of the problem -- possibly even the primary cause of disorder -- over the past week or more. If they’re not out in force to order, demand, and provoke, then Occupy protesters are less likely to pose a problem to anyone else.

Simple, yes? Why did this not occur to anyone before? (Actually, it did . . . to the progressive Mayor and police of Lansing, Michigan, though admittedly they’ve had to deal with a much smaller group of demonstrators -- but the collaborative approach between protesters and authorities is the essential point here.)

Occupy Portland, part 8 - Aftermath . . . and Prelude

It is almost exactly a week since zero hour for the Occupy Portland camp -- the Sunday morning, 12:01 a.m. “eviction” deadline set by Mayor Sam Adams.

The camp didn’t really get “swept” until the following afternoon, in a masterful display of tactical strategy and mostly smooth execution by Portland Police, with a lot of assistance from outside law enforcement agencies. Part of me felt, and continues to feel, that the camp had run its course, and it was just as well that it ended when and as it did.

Things have gotten uglier, unfortunately … though not half as bad as the local media and police have tried to make them appear. Marches and small localized protests have continued daily. Thursday, November 17, was the two-month anniversary of the launch of Occupy Wall Street, and Portland avidly joined in the demonstrations that occurred all across the country to commemorate and celebrate it.

Occupy Portland, part 7 - I've Got a Bad Feeling About This

Tonight, I am in mourning. Perhaps that should be pre-mourning, because the death hasn’t happened yet, but I’m afraid it’s coming fast.

Two days ago, in my last commentary on this blog, I promised to give readers a tour of the Occupy Portland camp, but circumstances have overtaken me. It looks very much like push has come to shove in Stumptown, because Thursday morning the Mayor and Police Chief of Portland gave the protesters an eviction notice: they have been told to clear the parks they have occupied for the past five weeks by midnight Saturday, about 48 hours from now.

Mayor Sam Adams, who sympathizes with the political-economic goals of the Occupy movement, has decided that the protesters have lost too much support across the city for him to continue to allow them to camp on the site without a permit.

The real message is that Occupy Portland has lost the war for the hearts and minds of the rest of the city; at least, the mayor and many others in city government believe this to be the case, based on complaints from neighboring businesses, highly publicized if relatively isolated criminal incidents and arrests on or near the site, and the constant carping of ignorant critics on the websites of the newspaper and the various local news stations.

Occupy Portland, part 6 - An Interim Report, November 8, 2011

Conditions at the Occupy Portland site have settled into an ongoing if uneasy truce. An offshoot of the movement -- largely not in accord with the main body of protesters, as best as I understand it -- has been trying to create a permanent tent camp on federal land one block south of the main encampment.

The federal park is known as Terry Schrunk Plaza. It contains a grassy area that slopes gently down to a small brick amphitheater where I have watched friends perform Shakespeare in years past. Pictured below is the brick amphitheater space, where a band was setting up last Saturday afternoon to entertain the protesters. Schrunk Plaza is a public space that requires no permit or fees for temporary use, but overnight stays are prohibited.

Although Occupy Portland holds its General Assembly meeting, which can last two to four hours, in Schrunk Plaza every night at 7 p.m., the main body of the protesters understands and abides by the regulations to clear the area overnight. A splinter group has chained itself to one another and the site for the past three evenings; so far, the feds are holding back.

Coming in Sick to Work - Being a Standardized Patient

[ Just so everybody's clear that "American Currents" is still my general blog and not an "All Occupy/All the Time" station, here's a commentary on a different aspect of my recent activities. There will be more to come, on other topics, as well. Stay tuned. . . ]

Yesterday I had pneumonia, complicated by my asthma, high blood pressure, and one-pack-a-day smoking habit. On Wednesday I was blind as a complication from my diabetes.

Last year, I had heart disease, lower back pain, asthma, and a drinking problem I was not inclined to be readily honest about. I look forward someday to receiving a cancer diagnosis, thyroid condition, and a sexually transmitted disease . . . but probably not a positive Pap smear.

If you’re wondering what I’ve been doing in the hospital, I work now and then as a Standardized Patient (or “SP”). This means I pretend to be a patient in medical exams conducted by first-year, second-year, and third-year medical students, nurse practitioners, and naturopaths at several medical teaching institutions in the city.

Occupy Portland, part 5 - What Am I Doing Here?

When I got home from my first morning of volunteering at the Occupy Portland site, back on Friday, Oct. 21, I posted the following status update on my Facebook wall:

“Occupy Portland has become my church.”

It was an amorphous, gut-level notion that somehow accurately described my feelings coming out of (or maybe that should be “starting into”) the experience. The next day, a friend I hadn’t seen in many months asked me what I meant by it. I didn’t have a ready answer for her. I’ve thought about it ever since.

You should know that my real church history has been uneven and spotty to effectively nonexistent. When I was a kid, my folks took me to Sunday School at First Unitarian in Eugene. They themselves were probably agnostics at that point, but they liked the social conscience and activism of that congregation, especially its pastor, the Rev. Carl Nelson, who preached early and hard against the Vietnam War.

Occupy Portland, part 4 - You Know . . . Maybe They Really ARE Fighting Dirty

Take a look at the photographs in this column. Doesn’t it look like something significant happened here in Portland yesterday (Friday, October 28)?

A huge sound stage was set up in Pioneer Square, often referred to as “Portland’s Living Room.” A band made up of the youthful classical/jazz/Latin/swing band Pink Martini (they make their homes in Portland and they’re big in Europe), guest vocalist Storm Large, and some musicians from the Oregon Symphony formed the core of the event.

They performed three of their songs and led the crowd in singing almost a dozen classic pop, musical, and folk songs. Twelve different speakers, including two rabbis, three Protestant ministers, an Imam, two U.S. Congressmen, the state AFL-CIO president, and several activists and organizers addressed the crowd, to much cheering and applause. Starbucks handed out free coffee and chocolate at three different stands around the square.

Occupy Portland, part 3 - Democracy is Messy

[Events are taking place faster than I can keep up with them on my blog, so I’ve decided to provide links at the end of each commentary, where you can find information on news about Occupy Portland and upcoming events. Page down for those….]

I don’t want to leave the impression here that I think everything happening at the Occupy Portland camp is sweetness and light, or that I'm trying to sell that notion to anyone else.

There are many other topics I’d like to address about the protest, eventually -- such as the camp’s relations with the city government and Portland Police; the misleading spin (unintended or otherwise) contained in local TV news reports I have seen; the bigger mission and potential outcomes of the protest -- but at this point I felt I should talk about some of the problems I’ve witnessed or heard about.

As they say, democracy is messy.

Every night at 7 p.m., a General Assembly (GA) meeting takes places at Terry Schrunk Plaza, a small brick arena across Madison Street to the south of the encampment, which is federal land. My schedule hasn’t allowed me to make it to a GA meeting, but OP volunteers try to take notes and post them as soon as possible on the Occupy Portland website.

I understand that much of the discussion at General Assembly meetings has revolved around the same safety and security concerns that the greater public outside the camp has expressed: that Occupy Portland seems to include homeless persons, mentally ill folks, recreational drug consuming and dealing individuals, and possibly criminals. (The couple show here are NOT examples of these subgroups, but more typical citizens chatting on a bench in Chapman Square.)

Occupy Portland, part 2 - This Is Bigger Than You Think

On my first day volunteering for Occupy Portland, I verified a suspicion -- or maybe in the beginning it was just a hope -- that what we see in the camps, especially if we only watch the television news, is the tip of a possibly massive iceberg.

There are indeed a lot of regular folks who support this motley crowd, both in spirit and in deed.

And unlike an iceberg, the substance you see above the waterline is not the same as the material below. Although I saw plenty of middle-class visitors and suit-coated businesspeople who just strolled through the camp -- looking around or heading to and from work -- not a few of them meant business. I know, because they stopped to talk to me and hand me things while I was at the information desk (that's me on duty, at right).

A large middle-aged man in outdoor clothing advised me: “Yesterday the city of Portland got their property tax bills; you’ll get a lot of support from the middle if you go after the right targets.” A more sharply dressed man said he had done very well in real estate, appreciation, etc., and “I don’t pay very much taxes -- that’s why I donate so much. We’re fighting evil here.”

Carl Anderson, a military serviceman 30 years ago who since has worked “half my life” in the Wells Fargo Building, a white tower that overlooks the occupation site from the southwest, said his coffee breaks in the Occupy Portland site have gotten longer and longer. “You guys gotta stay here until the next presidential election, at least,” he remarked. He also mentioned that he has only 12 years left before he retires, and I thought to myself: I could never work at any job for that long.

Occupy Portland, part 1 - First Impressions

I knew that if I volunteered at the Information desk I’d be learning a lot more than I’d be helping anyone. But that was part of the point: I figured this would be the fastest way to get a handle on what’s been happening on Chapman and Lownsdale Squares, downtown Portland, over the past two weeks.

You probably won't be able to read it in the above photo, but posted at the entrance to Lownsdale Square, and elsewhere around the parks, are the camp's extensive "Collective Agreement on Guidelines for Community Safety and Well-Being." They dub the Occupy site weapon-free and nonviolent; prohibit any recreational alcohol or drug use; sequester cigarette smoking to the corner of SW 4th and Main; and call for respectful treatment among everyone, among other things. The panel on the right lists the steps to take in response to any threats to safety and well-being on the site. 

I had participated in the initial protest march on Oct. 6 that involved at least 4,000 people and might have drawn in as much as 6,000 or 10,000 -- various numbers have gotten batted around in the media -- but I hadn’t had a chance to get a good look at the site where the long-haul protesters had chosen to camp ever since.

Yossarian Lives! in a tent with Occupy Wall Street

By now I had planned to have an update on Occupy Portland for this blog, but my schedule has kept me from making a full on-site inspection.

Occupy Portland has settled into a pair of city parks about seven blocks from my apartment -- as the crow flies; eight if you have to keep to the streets -- and I’ve strolled by a couple of times as well as monitored developments on the local news. But I haven't yet taken the time to wander through and talk to the protesters.

Occupy Portland is well into its second week. Occupy Wall Street has completed its fourth week. Worldwide “Occupy” protests have spread to 951 cities in 82 countries, according to Wikipedia …

… and this week is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.

So many commentators have been writing about Occupy Wall Street that I probably won’t be the first to note the wonderful coincidence between Yossarian’s 50th birthday and the Occupy movement’s message of anti corporate greed, anti endless, meaningless wars, and against the government’s abiding bias toward the rich.

But over the past year I’ve been working on a close study of Catch-22 for Book Drum, a British Web site for which I’ve previously profiled Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

So Yossarian, the hapless 28-year-old anti-hero of Heller’s 1961 classic, ostensibly about World War II but actually about so much more -- from McCarthyism and war profiteering in every armed conflict to the arbitrariness of power, government bureaucracy, and, yes, corporate greed -- has been much on my mind.

Occupy Wall Street comes to Portland, Oregon

On Day 19 of Occupy Wall Street, a crazy idea first proposed in July by the activist magazine AdBusters, the odd little protest that started in New York City’s financial district on Sept 17 (see the CNN Money overview of the phenomenon) went national.

Yesterday -- Thursday, Oct. 6 -- after little coverage in the national broadcast media but plenty of buzz on social media networks, Occupy Wall Street spread to Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other U.S. cities.

That especially included Portland, Oregon, where someone’s always protesting something, often within ten blocks of my downtown apartment. I hadn’t heard or read much about Occupy Wall Street, but I did find it curious that what seemed to be an ongoing populist event in Lower Manhattan, resulting in arrests and some violence by police against protestors, had not made much of a splash in the news on my local TV stations.

When Facebook friends passed along word of a march in Portland on Oct. 6, I decided to check it out. Here's the initial gathering with the Burnside Bridge across the Willamette River in the background. My wife Carole took this and the next photo.

Shortly after noon I got to Waterfront Park, listened to some of the speeches and comments as the crowd grew, and decided to volunteer as a “police liaison,” knowing that I was older than the average protestor and less likely either to get hassled by the police or to lose my cool.

The Flickering Light of a Book

The recent news that Kindle owners will now be able to download library books into their electronic reader seemed like a positive blow for booklovers and readers everywhere.

It might be. But it makes me nervous.

Brier Dudley, business commentator for the Seattle Times, sounded a cautionary note in his column this week. The deal between Amazon and public libraries may be the turning point at which the latter make a massive shift away from the print to digital media, he wrote. The historically egalitarian nature of libraries may erode as larger portions of public library collections become accessible only to patrons who can afford to own e-books and computers.

He adds that Amazon gets another opportunity to advertise every time someone downloads a book. Most ominous, Amazon still isn’t paying taxes to local governments for sales it closes with residents of a given locale. The company has been fighting California’s efforts to collect such revenues, with some success.

I don’t own a Kindle. I don’t expect ever to own one . . . but there is one in my home.

If anything qualified as the must-have holiday gift for grownups in 2010, it probably was the Kindle. In 2009, 2.9 million Amazon Kindle e-readers were sold, and Bloomberg analysts projected sales of 5 million the following year. By December 31, however, sales of Amazon’s e-book had beaten that figure handily: the company sold 6 million in 2010.

Apple iPads outsold Kindles in less time—an estimated 7.46 million flew out of stores between their April debut and September—but something tells me there were a lot more teenagers in that group, whether they spent their own money or their folks’, than there were among Kindle purchasers. I have to wonder how many of those teen iPad users are reading books on their screens.

Because she had requested it, I ordered my wife Carole a Kindle in late November for one of her holiday gifts. Since the beginning of December (Chanukah was early this year), I’ve been hearing about its manifold delights. I can make notes she tells me, and download them into our home iMac later; I can look up the dictionary definition of any word on the spot. I can carry multiple books in my purse, and when I finish one -- or even in the middle of one -- I can switch to another.

That’s nice, I think to myself, but you’ll never get me to want one of those. I love the heft of books, the smell of them, the physical reality of each one. I grew up carrying a stack of books to and from school (I was infamous for this among my classmates), and I expect to carry pleasure reading in printed form -- nearly always a clothbound copy, as well, not a paperback -- until the day I die.

The cover art and the weight are integral parts of a book’s character: I just finished a 1300-page translation of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, and the 4.3 pounds it weighed will always be part of my memory of the experience of reading it. That wouldn’t have been the case if I had read it on the same electronic device I could read any cheap paperback thriller.

Part of the achievement of having finished Proust or Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow is finally putting that sucker down. How does Joyce or Pynchon feel any different from Agatha Christie, Danielle Steel or Stephen King when they’ve all weighed and even looked the same in your hand?

If you drop a printed book in the tub, or in a puddle, you’ve damaged one book. If you drop a Kindle, you’ve lost several, maybe even hundreds, of books. Amazon will let you download the ones you’ve already paid for again, on another machine, but you do have to buy another machine. You can even still read a wet and muddy book, but I imagine a dead electronic reader won’t give you a single digital word.

My fear is that the more public libraries are drawn into Amazon’s commercial agenda, the fewer choices we’ll end up enjoying. I’ve seen this pattern with almost every technological “advance” that’s come down the pike over the course of my life. Some of the 33-1/3 vinyl LPs I owned as a kid never became available on cassette. Something similar happened with the switch from VHS tapes to DVDs: obscure favorites of mine like Kobayashi’s “Harakiri,” which took forever to find on tape, took even longer to find on disk.

CDs have stayed around long enough and are sufficiently inexpensive to manufacture that most of the obscure albums and even vinyl bootlegs by Gentle Giant, King Crimson, and even the Banana Splits that I owned as a teen eventually got reissued. (No sign of Catfish Hodge’s solo “Boogeyman Gonna Get You,” however.) Even my friends, personal and Internet based, have turned out their solo and band recordings on CD. The faster technology moves forward, though, the fewer choices we tend to have, because manufacturers can only afford to turn out product that has mass appeal: lowest-common-denominator entertainment, from Stephen King and Britney Spears to the “Transformers” series and degraded remakes of finer original flicks.

It was a disappointment in college when I discovered some of work of writers I wanted to read had not been translated into English and might never be (e.g., the Danish journalist and feminist Suzanne Broegger, and the Polish existential novelist Witold Gombrowicz). Now I have to worry that the library may only order some books in electronic form, or not at all, because only a handful of readers -- including me -- might care to read them.

This is how corporate-driven consumerism actually gives us less choice, makes us less free, in a supposedly democratic society.

P.S. I am currently rereading Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities for one of my three book discussion groups, about to open Peter Carey's Parrot & Olivier in America for another one, am reading Henning Mankell's final Kurt Wallander thriller The Troubled Man for my own pleasure, and am making copious notes about Joseph Heller's Catch-22 for the extensive profile I'm writing for the Book Drum website, where I have already profiled Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. So you'll see me carrying one or more of the first four books on the streets of Portland over the coming week . . . .

Peter Piper Picked a Peck of Pica Patter - David J. Loftus

Many different things will tell you that time is passing and – incidentally -- that you’re getting older.

There are the increasing number of aches and pains when you get up in the morning (and sometimes when you go to bed). There are the sports stars in the news and the parents with strollers that pass you on the street who seem to get younger and younger. Former schoolmates have children that shoot up at high speed and soon give your old friends grandchildren.

One of the more subtle ones is how the meaning or usage of a simple word can alter dramatically through the years.

This occurred to me the other day when I wore my black tee shirt that says “PICA.” In this instance it stands for Portland Institute of Contemporary Art. I earned it doing one of those crazy artistic gestures: reading literature aloud on a street corner to passing vehicle and pedestrian traffic. (I spent an hour reading from Don DeLillo’s White Noise on one day and an hour reading from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man on another.)

A 21-year-old friend saw my shirt and blanched. She told me that pica is the term for an eating disorder in which the victim chooses to swallow indigestible materials such as dirt, metal, sand, or wood chips. It was the first time I’d ever heard of it.

I thought back to what pica primarily referred to when I was a teenager. It was a term in typography and layout, back when printers actually laid little metal slugs next to one another, with a letter on the end of each one, to make a plate of print to run off multiple copies of posters and pages. Those days were coming to an end during my childhood.

A pica measured 1/6 of an inch, or the equivalent of a 12-point letter. Point size has actually become a more common concept since the advent of word processing on computers, which enables anyone to choose and reset type sizes on documents they create themselves.

But I graduated from college just before PCs and Macs flooded university campuses. I typed my college papers on manual and electric typewriters. Back then, there were only two principal forms of typewriters: pica and elite. Pica typewriters put ten characters per inch on the page -- most often in that classic old font, Courier, which looks positively dowdy when it comes out of a laser printer. Elite typewriters could fit 12 characters into an inch, and therefore dozens more words on a page.

When it came time to do my undergraduate thesis, the difference became crucial. My department limited students to a total of 60 pages for their theses, end notes and bibliography included. As I got into the writing, I could see I might want to fit in more text than 60 pages of pica type on my typewriter would allow . . . so I borrowed an elite typewriter from a friend to tap out the final draft of my thesis. I'm sure there were other students who probably preferred a pica typewriter because they didn't have as much to say.

All of this would have been so much easier to juggle – margins, font sizes, and everything else – if I had been able to compose on a desktop computer or laptop, but they simply didn’t exist for ready use at universities until a few years later. By then, pica as a typographic unit would have ceased to be an issue . .  . but increasing awareness of anorexia and bulimia had simultaneously raised medical and scientific interest in pica, the eating disorder.

That version of pica has not been subject to much formal research. Researchers think it may be attributable to a mineral deficiency, which the eater tries to make up by consuming materials that contain that mineral. Some scientists believe it might be more of a mental problem -- a form of obsessive-compulsive order. Possibly more as an act of desperation, the condition may occur in more than half of pregnant mothers who live in poverty-stricken African nations.

Being a recovering English major and continuing writer, I mainly wondered how the name came about. Apparently, pica as a term for the disease come from the Latin word for magpie, a bird reputed to eat anything. I don’t know how it evolved as a term for typographical measurement, although it sounds like it relates to the word for “small” in any number of Latin languages.

Anyway, it’s fascinating that the same word can turn up in such divergent applications.

Two Years Before the Cast

[We're back!  Obviously there's been a holdup in new commentaries to this site, and we're still not sure whether the permissions and traffic through the ISP is working out, but once all that is squared away, we can get back to timely remarks about the state of the nation and the world. In the mean time, the piece below is a slightly reworked and expanded version of a note I put on my Facebook page last July 17. . . .]

People who haven’t worked as a stage or film actor tend to have two opposing reactions to the notion of the actor’s life.

On the one hand, actors get to do fun stuff and the work’s gotta be easy -- anybody can act, right? . . . but on the other hand, the average person can’t imagine going through constant auditions and getting rejected, over and over, week after week, month after month.

There’s a bit of truth to both points of view, but a lot of falsehood -- or let us say, inaccuracy -- to them as well.

Two years ago, on July 17, 2009, I lost my job. That morning, with no prior warning, after nearly five years of steady employment in that office, my boss told me he was going to have to lay me off. After several hours of panic, my wife Carole said, you know, you’ve been complaining about how you don’t have your days free to audition for commercial acting jobs. I’ve crunched the numbers, and if you can get unemployment, we might be able to buy you a year to try doing that.

When the practical, managerial member of the team says “why don’t you give that dream a shot?” you’d best get on it. It is now well over two years since I last had a full-time day job, and I have begun to suspect I may not have to look for another.

Between that July 17 and the most recent July 17, by my rough count I went through 130 auditions -- for video commercials, print ad shoots, feature films, musical and dramatic stage productions, staged readings of plays, voiceover jobs for radio or video ads and animated films, even part-time work as a tour guide.

That calculates out to little more than one try-out per week over the course of 104 weeks -- except that Carole and I also took four weeks of vacation outside the country during that time. So perhaps it’s closer to an average of 1.3 auditions per week, although in some weeks I didn’t have any and in others I did three or four -- often two in a single day.

And does it feel like constant rejection? Not really. When you do that many, that regularly, the sting of most of them lessens to almost nothing. It’s not that different from many of the going-through-the-motions tasks you have to do in the typical day job. Most of the time you’re not brooding over the audition you just had, or the job you didn’t get, so much as planning for the next audition or possibly wondering about the results of three or four still out there hanging.

It’s like lying on a bed of nails: when there are so many, they hardly cause the kind of pain you’d feel if you stepped on just one.

And to set up those 130 auditions, I had to pursue at least 279 queries or referrals. I posted multiple emails or made telephone calls in response to Craigslist ads, Internet discussion lists, tips from friends, and even an occasional invitation from a director or producer who knew my work. It required constant hustling.

But if you keep at it and develop good work habits (staying patient and polite, knowing your lines, remembering directors’ comments), you will land projects. During the two years after I lost my day job, I got cast in at least 60 projects, from print shoots and industrial videos to film extra work and voiceovers. I didn’t even do six of them due to scheduling conflicts or because I didn’t like the job or the terms (usually, a small role in a stage show for long hours with little pay). Not all of them paid money, of course, but they all entailed on-the-job acting experience, new networking connections, and often a little food or video footage I could use to market my talents elsewhere.

I did a minimum of 64 shoots in those two years, more than one every other week, from posing as a surgeon at Oregon Health and Science University or a potential Infiniti buyer at a Beaverton, Oregon car dealer to multiple sessions on sets as an evil genetic scientist, a movie producer, an Arab archaeologist, a police detective, an orthodontist.

Can someone make a living at this in Portland? If you’re not also a teacher or freelance acting coach, probably not. And for most of the past two years, I didn’t think I ultimately would be able to survive without a day job. I drew unemployment benefits, I did a little temporary office work, and in the back of my mind I just assumed that sooner or later I’d be looking for another full- or part-time office job.

But Craigslist came through last October with a classic work-at-home, set-your-own-hours freelance writing job that uses all my past journalism, research, editing, and proofreading skills and experience -- and more important, leaves me in control of my days so I can continue to audition for commercial acting jobs and do them when they’re offered. Pending the approval of my client, I may tell you about that in another commentary.

As recently as three years ago, I couldn’t have imagined making it as a freelance writer OR actor, but somehow life has allowed me to put together a combination of both. Perhaps 85 percent of my current income derives from the writing, and the rest from acting and modeling.

None of this would have been workable if Carole and I hadn’t already simplified and slimmed down our lifestyle. We gave up car ownership ten years ago, moved to a 667-square foot urban apartment at the center of town, have no mortgage or consumer debt, and simply live on a lot less than we used to -- all for the freedom and flexibility that lifestyle can offer, and long before either of us knew I might be plunging seriously into acting and modeling.

So what was I doing on the second anniversary of the day I lost my job, which happened to be a Sunday? Why, a commercial video shoot -- the 2011 version of the Web ad for the rollout of the AutoCAD/AutoDesk software for Mac computers which I did for the 2010 version the year before -- of course.

And working on memorizing 3 to 4 pages of script each day for the next week and a half in preparation for another video shoot, scheduled to occur over three days. And over the 10 days until then, an audition for a TV show, a meeting to discuss a junket to a national storytelling festival in Utah next February, a rehearsal for a job doing a lead character’s voice for a film screening, and a video shoot for a proposed Web series.

I think I’m doing okay.

[Photos: at top, the author as Sitting Bull in the current Lakewood Theatre Company production of "Annie Get Your Gun"; at bottom, the author as a technogeek in an architectural firm, in a Web ad for the 2010 rollout of AutoCAD/AutoDesk for Macs -- my first paid commercial job landed through my talent agency, and shot on Aug. 14, 2010. For the entire ad, see it on YouTube.]

Osama is Dead; Now, Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Programming - David Loftus

I’ll try to keep this short.

I don’t think May 1, 2011 was (or will turn out to have been) a historic day for the United States of America.

I don’t believe, after the apparent euphoria subsides, that the death of Osama bin Laden will change much of anything for us, at home or in the world.

I don’t even believe justice has been done, and it raises my hackles to have heard the local news broadcasters repeatedly use that phrase tonight. (Hunting down bin Laden may have been right, for us; it may even have been necessary. But if it didn’t involve due process under some system of laws, U.S. or international, then it was not justice. It was vengeance.)

As for my fellow Americans cheering at baseball fields, in public parks, and in various comments throughout the news feed on my Facebook page, I feel a mild disgust and pity.

Most of the time, I try to be a voice of moderation on this blog. It ain’t necessarily so, is typically my refrain. Step back and take a closer look at what’s being said, what we thought was happening, what you and I were inclined to think at first glance.

And my basic message remains that tonight, but I have to make it stronger because the cheering for the death of bin Laden reminds me of nothing so much as the mindless cheering that greeted President Bush’s wrongheaded announcements that we were going to war in Afghanistan, and then Iraq. I opposed them then, and I have seen nothing since to change my opinion.

The cheering from my fellow citizens tonight suggests to me they’re nowhere near to grasping the larger contexts. International policy is not a playoff series, and neither war nor international police actions should be treated like a football match.

Rather than try to preach at length, I’ll just pose a few questions. Ask yourself if you have an answer for them, or whether you’ve seen anyone else ask – let alone answer – them in recent hours.

·      Did the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq ever have anything to do with the hunt for bin Laden?

·      If they did, why are so many people assuming they’ll just go on now, and not stop, the way Obama promised they would?

·      Why have more than 6,000 American servicepeople and 120,000 foreign civilians died early and violent deaths over there?

·      Why didn’t we capture bin Laden long before now? What is it that kept President Bush from getting that job done in eight years of supposedly trying his best?

·      Just how is it that the most wanted terrorist in the world managed to camp out comfortably within the borders of one of our greatest supposed allies for the past five years?

Let me know. In the mean time I'm going back to the warm fuzzy commentaries I have been composing for this blog the past week or two.

The Despicable Critters - David Loftus

It’s been an awful month for horses.

Personally, I am not especially sentimental about equine quadrupeds. Growing up a lower middle class city kid, I was never around one, and I have ridden a horse only twice in my lifetime (both very tame and well-trained critters who probably required no direction from me). I can appreciate their beauty and respect my wife’s more informed opinion that, in personality, horses have a lot in common with dogs.

But I am against needless suffering on the part of any living creatures. And two incidents over the past week and a half illustrate -- through infliction of superfluous, ghastly, and ultimately mortal pain on sweet innocent animals -- the far-too-common hatefulness and murderous inconsideration of our “noble” species.

Yesterday, eight horses (one just a week old and another about to give birth) burned to death in a barn fire in Ohio that authorities believe was deliberately set as an anti-gay hate crime. Last week, six racehorses burned to death on a freeway in Colorado because a passing driver flicked a burning cigarette butt -- inadvertently, one hopes, though that didn't make a difference to the horses -- into their trailer.

In one case, these simple and gentle creatures suffered agonizing deaths because some person or persons indulged his (and you pretty much have to assume the masculine pronoun applies in this case) pig-ignorant fears and insecurities, spray-painted “fags are freaks” and “burn in hell” on the barn walls, and set fire to the interior after walking right past the stalled (which is to say trapped) animals. What better illustration could one have of the inhumanity and despicable irrationality of homophobia? Couldn’t the arsonist(s) at least have let the horses out of their stalls and the barn door first?

In the other, a motorist indulged his or her filthy addiction and unconcern for others by “merely” littering on a federal highway … with the result that, again, innocent and sweet creatures died in massive pain and agony. The only thing worse is when a despairing, indebted, and separated or divorced father takes a gun or a match to his children as well as himself. (And yes, that happened across town this week, too.) I hope the law catches up with the malefactors in both of the horse incidents and somehow makes them see -- really see -- the consequences of their actions.

When a human being behaves abominably, we often automatically call him an "animal," but it's hard to think of an act an animal might commit like these two incidents. Saying an animal was behaving as thoughtlessly and murderously as a human would be the worse insult.

We all make mental calculations about when to abide by laws and when not to -- from littering and walking against the light to driving after a few drinks -- but some “simple and harmless” offenses, it turns out, can have far deadlier effects than others. Better to observe the letter and spirit of the law as best you can, as much as you can.