Rain, Rain, Come Our Way. . . .

It may have rained last night; the ground looks damp, and the neighboring roof is shining in the morning sun.

I sure hope it rained. It has been more than 70 days since we’ve had anything like what you’d call rainfall in Portland, Oregon.

Official reports recorded only a “trace” in the entire month of August. In September, a couple of fat drops hit me on the evening of Friday the 14th while I was on my way to see a friend’s production of Yasmina Reza’s “Art”; and a week later I awoke to a damp and shiny neighborhood somewhat like what I can see this morning. Two nights ago, a local news station said we’d had a total of four-hundredths of an inch for the entire month.

Most of the rest of the state of Oregon, and indeed, the Pacific Northwest, has been just as dry. Seattle went 48 days without any rain until mid September.

Normal rainfall in our city at this time of year is a little over an inch in August, a little less than two in September. I can’t say it’s been unpleasant; we’ve had a week or more of 90-plus temperatures and a couple days that exceeded 100, which is not that uncommon for us.

I lead walking tours of downtown Portland for visitors to the city, and tourists from Palm Springs, Phoenix, Texas, and Naples, Florida happily told me they had escaped relentless three-digit temperatures—plus the high humidity that is even more rare than 100 degrees here.

But as a native Oregonian and a resident of Portland the past 21 years, week after week of sunshine and no precipitation (we haven’t even had that many overcast days!) feels very, very strange.

Semi-Happy Birthday, Occupy Wall Street

One year ago today, Occupy Wall Street made its move. Activists hoping to make a statement about corporate greed and multinational economic control took a stand at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, and a nationwide movement was born.

What a year it has been! On the plus side, phrases like “the 1 percent” and “the 99 percent” have entered common parlance, even among candidates for President of the United States. In the wake of Occupy, smaller pro-union protests and citizen reclamation of homes left empty by bank foreclosures have followed.

Legislative attempts to regulate banks and other financial institutions have tried to carry through at the state and federal level what protesters urged last fall. A substantial push is on to pass legislation to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.

But for too many Americans sitting in their suburban and Midwestern homes and clicking through the local news with their remotes, the Occupy movement has become a joke … last year’s reality TV hit … a dead cult.

And that’s a pity. Semi-happy birthday, Occupy Wall Street.

This afternoon I joined a Portland, Oregon march and rally in observance of the one-year anniversary of the birth of Occupy Wall Street. We gathered at the east end of the Burnside Bridge and walked with signs and banners to the grounds outside the permanent Occupy Portland office at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church in Southeast Portland.

It probably wasn’t even a mile. There were barely a hundred of us. But what was interesting to me (along with the reactions of passing motorists) was the overkill of news coverage versus the almost negligible police presence.

The 2012 Election is Over, Folks

The 2012 election has clearly become Obama’s to lose. And I feel confident at this point that he won’t.

As ridiculously tragic as this week’s toppling dominos might have appeared -- from the the promotion of “Muhammad Movie Trailer” by a crazed fundamentalist Christian pastor in Florida, and its excerpting by irresponsible journalists on Egyptian television, to the killing of a U.S. ambassador in Libya by terrorists who coolly manipulated general Muslim outrage over the video -- they will likely solidify the lead the President was already in the process of establishing over his klutz of an opponent.

In an election year, any sort of foreign tension tends to drive voters back to the incumbent; well, they tell themselves, we’d better pull together and stick with the horse in the middle of the stream. No telling what we’d get with the new guy … especially a mere state governor like Romney who has zero international experience.

The news from Benghazi, Cairo, Yemen, and elsewhere over the past four days coincided with reports that the President already was pulling away from the challenger in key battleground states. Polls indicated that Obama has developed a comfortable lead over Romney in the critical swing states of Ohio, Florida, and Virginia. See this morning’s report in the Washington Post.

An NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll found the President ahead by 50 percentage points to 43 in Ohio, 49 to 44 in Florida, and the same in Virginia. Such a lead is hardly an insurmountable one, except it was clear from the start that voter uncertainty over these candidates, and the movement of undecideds between them, was going to be smaller than usual.

Playing Dead

When I was 8 to 10 years old, I used to sneak through the neighborhood around my best friend Ron Cox’s house, tracking my buddies while they stalked me. I think Ron supplied all our toy guns. Each of us hoped to surprise and shoot the others. If someone “got the drop on you” and managed to shoot you (with oral sound effects) before you saw him, you had to play dead until your opponent had had enough time to get away. Then you were up again and hunting prey.

Currently, I’m in a stage production in which I play dead for an entire scene. The show is “City of Angels,” originally a 1989 hit on Broadway with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by David Zippel, and book by Larry Gelbart, famous for everything from “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” to “Tootsie,” “Oh God!” and TV’s “M*A*S*H.” One of the characters I play is a quack healer who is sponging off a disabled millionaire but gets shot in the head in the middle of the first act.

He spends the lengthy final scene of the first act as a stone-dead corpse in the morgue while other characters argue, sing, and dance around him. It’s a somewhat long scene: a fair amount of dialogue bracketed by two different musical numbers go by while I lie motionless on a gurney upstage center. It lasts about nine and a half minutes: I timed it one night.

Grimm and Bare It - Getting on to "Grimm," part 2

I was absolutely convinced I would not get this role. The character description read: “rotund but well-built man … reminiscent of the IRA … been through the wars, been in many fights, and should look like it.” But of course, I thought wryly; anybody would think of me when you read that!

As my friends and family know (as well as faithful readers of this blog, assuming there are any), I was laid off from my last day job pretty much without warning on July 17, 2009. That forced me into the long process of becoming a full-time free-lance writer and actor … a process that has been up and down, and continues to be filled with uncertainty, but has been mostly a happy one. I posted a summary of part of that process -- at least with regard to auditions, simplifying our life, and finding an ongoing free-lance writing job that has helped me make ends meet while keeping my daily schedule flexible -- last September.

There were other landmarks along the way. I did my first TV extra work, on the TNT series Leverage, on August 17, 2009, for “The Future Job”; and on August 30-31, 2009 for the final show of the second season, “The Maltese Falcon Job.” I signed with Ryan Artists, a talent agency, on August 27, 2009, although they promoted me initially as a “lifestyle model” (read: older, for Baby Boomer goodies and services). They said they could not be sure whether my stage experience would make the transition to film and video.

On November 25, 2009, I got cast in my first indie feature, which would shoot January-June 2010 and become known as “Coup de Cinema.” It took nearly a year for me to land my first commercial job through my agent: a Web ad for AutoDesk we shot on August 14, 2010, released online about six weeks later. Two more commercial jobs followed within less than a month. I was off and running.

Go On, Try to Wipe This Grimm Off My Face

Obviously, I’ve neglected this site for a while. Less obviously to anyone who’s not a Facebook friend of mine, I’ve been having a wonderfully busy time.

Periodically, since this site became largely mine by default in the spring of 2010, I’ve taken readers on a series of junkets. There was the experiment in collecting recycled bottles and cans for cash redemption (five essays between May 15, 2010 and September 2, 2010), my adventures as an actor in 48-Hour Film Festival projects (which ran August 14, 2010; August 16, 2010; August 20, 2010; August 24, 2010; and September 16, 2010; and never got completed), and a quick three-fer in October 2010 about the use of obscenity in protesting military actions. I also wrote two columns about reading Proust.

My longest series was of course entirely unforeseen and unplanned: a ten-part report on the Occupy Portland camp after it set up 8 blocks from my apartment, with two “pre” columns and three post-eviction commentaries. The final report, “Raking Leaves and Revolution,” on Dec. 17, 2011, has links to all the previous ones, if you want to catch up on them. (Which is not to say Occupy Portland is dead. Far from it! Check out my interview with Jake, an Occupy Portland organizer, on the Pop2Politics show that originally aired Feb. 26, 2012.)

Take Two, They're Fast . . . Why I Read More Than One Book at a Time

Some book lovers are monogamous: they read one book at a time, and finish it before picking up the next. Others are what we might call polybiblious: We like to read more than one book at the same time.

I suspect it’s a habit I developed in college, when every day I had to read different books for different classes. Some were history, some were historical novels, some were critical analyses of poetry and fiction.

Today, more than 30 years out of school, I still prefer to read two (or three, or four) books simultaneously. This morning, for instance, I read 15 or 20 pages of the third (translated) installment of a wonderfully dark series of police procedurals set in Iceland, by Arnaldur Indriðason, titled The Draining Lake. Once I’d arrived at the coffee shop where I could relax and spread out before a video shoot, I put that one in my bag and returned to about page 320 of Believing the Lie, the seventeenth and latest Inspector Lynley mystery by Elizabeth George.

Sometimes, you’re forced by external circumstances to read more than one book at a time. There’s the book you most want to read, and the book or two that you have to read … because the book group is meeting to discuss it in a few days, because it’s due at the library and someone else has placed a reserve request on it, or because (occasionally, in my case) you’ve promised to review it for someone. But I also like to read two or three books at once, most of the time. Rather than grind away at one to the finish before turning to another, my mind likes a change of pace, scene, or style after an hour or two, and most books take longer than that.

Usually, the best combination is a nonfiction book and a novel. Here’s why. Say you get engrossed in the fiction and feel compelled to finish the story. If the other one you’re reading is biography, history, or science, that’s easier to put aside and come back to after a week -- even a month or more -- and not feel the story’s gone cold. That doesn’t work so well with literature or a thriller, where you strain to recall who’s who and what was happening when you put it down.

As fascinating as it can be, nonfiction doesn’t often zing and zip as often as a good thriller, so whether the nonfiction I’m currently enjoying is a fat or thin tome, I often get through two, three, or more novels before I finish the nonfiction alternative. More than a decade ago, I steadily renewed a library copy of Norman Davies’s Europe: A History -- a rich 1,365 pages -- for almost a year, leaving it fallow for months on end before finally reaching the final page. It’s a wonderful book, but still a bit of a slog.

I must have started and finished dozens of other books before completing the Davies and returning it to the Multnomah County Library. I don’t know whether to be pleased that I got to keep it that long or saddened that apparently no one else was interested in it.

Which is not to say I never read two or three novels at once. Over the past year, my growing thirst for mysteries and police procedurals has had me simultaneously enjoying tales from different continents (Henning Mankell’s Swedish mysteries; or Colin Cotterill’s adventures of Dr. Siri, a septuagenarian coroner in Laos) and time periods (Bruce Alexander’s 17th-century London magistrate, Sir John Fielding, and Philip Kerr’s hard-boiled private eye in Nazi Berlin and post-war Argentina, Bernie Gunther). Witness this morning’s adventures of Iceland and Scotland Yard detectives.

When you’re dependent on the library for most of your reading material, there is an element of gambling to this process. Every once in a while, a request from another reader catches you in the middle of a book you’re really enjoying. Then you’re faced with a rock-versus-hard-place choice: put the others aside and finish the book, with a risk of going overdue and having to pay the fine, or return it half finished.

I think I have done the latter once or twice, and immediately entered another loan request to get the book back as soon as possible, but that’s so unpleasant that I usually choose to keep reading and pay the fine.

A Quick Shift in Gear

On March 18 and 24, I posted the first two parts of what I expected would be a series of columns on my latest adventure as an actor, which involved a brief appearance on a current television show. If you managed to read them, good for you.

However, I was advised to take the pieces offline because the network reportedly takes a dim view of any public discussion of a particular episode before it airs, and whether or not my carefully phrased posts were likely to offend the powers-that-be, it was thought best to remove them. So I've done that. I fully intend to re-post them, and more, after the particular show gets broadcast, but until then we'll just have to wait.


The initial section of the first one acknowledged the fact that "American Currents" had lain somewhat neglected since early February, and noted some of the previous activity on this site as follows.

Periodically, since this site became largely mine by default in the spring of 2010, I’ve taken readers on a series of junkets. There was the experiment in collecting recycled bottles and cans for cash redemption (five essays between May 15, 2010 and September 2, 2010), my adventures as an actor in 48-Hour Film Festival projects (which ran August 14, 2010; August 16, 2010; August 20, 2010; August 24, 2010; and September 16, 2010; and never got completed), and a quick three-fer in October 2010 about the use of obscenity in protesting military actions. I also wrote two columns about reading Proust.

Mouthing Off for the Mike and Cameras

Pop2Politics, a new show on BlogTalkRadio.com featuring myself as host, has been launched!

Believe me, this wasn’t my idea. Jeff Weiss, who conceived and established “American Currents” more than two years ago, and has maintained it as the power behind the throne (or the techie behind the Mouth -- that would be me), more recently inaugurated a pop culture talk show online called Pop2Reality.

That show, co-hosted by Jeff and Mark Roberts, features a weekly chat about celebrities and pop culture, focusing especially on reality TV shows. But Jeff’s a political junkie as well, and he wanted to get a second show going. He asked me to host it. Since he’s once again doing the heavy lifting from the production end, I’m willing to devote an hour or so to blathering out loud (and making a more conscientious effort to follow national and local political news with that end in view).

A Downside of Efficient and Over-teched Health Care

For any Americans prone to the assumption that U.S. wealth and capitalist “efficiency” make for inherently better health care and a safer population, think again.

An array of studies suggest that the U.S. has steadily become a more dangerous place for women to give birth than many other countries around the globe. Although this is not “news” in the sense of catching authorities by surprise, the average American probably isn’t aware of the facts, let alone the implications.

I ran across the story by chance in a Jan. 18 piece by Nicole Montesano in the McMinnville News-Register.  As Montesano stated in her lead, women in the U.S. are more likely to die in the course of childbirth than new mothers in most of Europe, quite a bit of Asia, and even the Middle East. While maternal mortality has declined in most countries over the past 20 years, it has almost doubled back home. (Note a sharply worded dissent in the comments section by an apparent female physician, though. I also will note a few disagreements with various aspects of these claims below.)

What are the possible reasons for this apparent rise in maternal mortality here? A crossfire of factors come into play, including:

·      Rising age and obesity among expectant mothers in the U.S., both of which correlate with greater risk in carrying a baby to term

·      Less access to regular medical care among African-American women, who are therefore four times as likely to die during or shortly after childbirth

·      Relative infrequency of pre- and post-partum health care for all mothers and infants in the U.S.; apparently, national health care systems like those in Canada and Western Europe require more pre-natal medical visits and provide more care after birth than U.S. insurance companies do (or new mothers are inclined to seek)

The Day It Rained Indoors

Sunday night, I finally threw them in the dumpster.

It was a stack of books, coated with a film of sickly grey dust . . . mold that had been growing for more than two years. I had held on to them this long because, on the one hand, I needed to check which pieces of my collection were a dead loss so I could adjust my records, and on the other, I wasn’t eager to face the task. So they had stayed in storage until I could get around to it.

This unpleasantness goes back to late August 2009. I had lost my job the month before and was in the process of applying for unemployment benefits and looking for temp work.

And then our storage closet, on the top floor of the apartment building -- the seventh floor, mind you -- suffered a leak. The HVAC system for the supermarket on the ground floor broke down and leaked water into the roof, which seeped through the concrete and onto my stored boxes of books, photo albums, papers, compact discs, and videos.

You can see in this first photo how the moisture dripped down from the ceiling on the very top of a high stack of boxes, and smeared the label “Photos” on the top one on its way down to others below. It wasn’t a flood, per se, but for mostly paper goods, it was enough, particularly since the cardboard absorbed the water and held it so it had plenty of time to seep into the contents of each box.

In itself, the disaster was tough to take, but its timing was another punch in the ribs. In just a few days I was committed to leave on an expensive, packaged vacation Carole and I had planned for months. I had only a couple days to try to dry out my valuables, get some sense of the damage, put it all away somehow, and pack up and go (and trust that my stuff in the closet would not get rained on again when I was away and could do nothing about it!).

Happy New Year, but No, Thank You . . . No Resolutions

With the New Year come the usual print and broadcast stories about resolutions -- the ones we make and perennially break. It’s a ritual as dependable as Easter eggs and July firecrackers.

My local paper reports that Portlanders are crowding gyms across the city, and getting a brave start on what is evidently a common New Year’s resolution: to lose weight and build muscle, especially after six to eight weeks of steady holiday dining.

What’s interesting (but rather a sad commentary on the clash between declining newspaper resources and readership versus increasing dependence on the Internet on the part of both newspaper reporters and their current and former readers), is the fact that the lead-off sentence in the Oregonian print story, and the headline for yesterday’s online version . . . is pretty stale news. It may not even be accurate.

A little digging by the discriminating news consumer reveals that the “fact” that four out of five gym memberships go unused is based on a survey more than six years old. This week’s story in the Oregonian links to a Livestrong.com report from last April. You have to read to the very bottom of that one, in the eighth and final paragraph, to learn that the relevant statistic, “80 percent of 40 million Americans” is attributed to Medical News Today, but there’s no link.