"Saving Mr. Banks" - a meditation on Hollywood and historicity

Saving Mr. Banks is one of the big movie hits of the season. After barely a month in release, it earned more than $20 million domestically, and as of Friday was closing on $60 million. Most of the critics have approved, as well -- some calling it a film that’s impossible to dislike. Its U.S. box office receipts make it Disney’s most profitable movie of the past 45 years other than The Lion King and Aladdin.

It purports to tell the story of P.L. Travers, Walt Disney, and how a fictional character named Mary Poppins was created by the one and recreated in a hit 1964 movie musical by the other.

It’s also not entirely truthful.

Now, I hate to come off like a fundamentalist picketing Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. I haven’t seen Saving Mr. Banks, and I don’t plan to -- more because it’s not the kind of movie I would spend my meager entertainment budget on than due to a stout ideological objection.

Hello, 2014 . . . and Welcome Back, Sports Fans!

Welcome back, and a Happy New Year!

Our blue-green jewel has completed another spin around El Sol, and as humans will do at this time of year, I’m reassessing. As I mentioned here two years ago, I don’t make New Year resolutions, per se; instead, for the coming year I think about things I want to accomplish in a general sort of way, and maybe a few specific professional goals. (But I also returned to the gym this week.)

One of those goals is to write more. Friends and colleagues notice my activity reports in terms of video, film, and stage work on Facebook and often remark, “it’s great that you’re living the dream.” But to be honest, acting and modeling never were my dream. They’re a job -- a pleasant, not too demanding, and often fun job -- but a job nonetheless.

Baiting the Links - an SEO Experiment

Today I’m treating you to something on the lighter side. But first, a little background.

In the middle of the summer of 2012, I answered a Craigslist ad that sought writers to compose SEO content. SEO (search engine optimization) refers to the array of strategies and tricks that websites use to rank high in Google searches when potential clients are looking for their goods, services, or information.

My new employer, Audience Bloom, was a brand-new startup based in Seattle. I went straight to work composing 400-500 word articles about reunion services, door companies in Phoenix, real estate agents and retirement centers in Seattle, and so on.

Since the only goal of his clients was to attract more traffic to their websites, the founder of Audience Bloom, Jayson DeMers, had the idea to try posting whimsical, entertaining pieces about nonexistent products that would pique readers’ interest and make them click through to the clients’ real websites. He called these fanciful pieces “link bait.”

Acting Mad

Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself in the middle of a short stage run in which I relate the story of my alien abduction, complete with seven-foot bunraku (Japanese puppetry) aliens. My cast mates and I also tell tales of childhood mishaps, physical and substance abuse, hallucinations (physical and aural), and recovery.

In one piece I talk about suffering at the hands of peers, teachers, parents, a babysitter, a rapist; in another short play, I embody a hallucination tormenting a woman as I happily swig from a bottle of Jack Daniels.

And I thought, going into this, I was just going to do some simple readings!

Several years ago, it dawned on me that I probably wouldn’t be doing much theater acting anymore. I had appeared in an average of three to five plays a year since 2005.

But in a smaller market like Portland, you can do theater pretty much only if you have a day job … because stage productions pay too little to live on. Or you can do commercial film, video, and print modeling if you have an independent and/or free-lance source of income, or perhaps that rare job that allows you complete control of your time … because you need your weekdays free to audition and work those sparse opportunities. Commercial shoots tend to keep bankers’ hours.

The Civil war (inside our hearts, as well as across society)

Several weeks ago, a group of active and well-meaning people organized a civility summit in Portland. Held in the cavernous ballroom of the Portland State University student center, it was something of a tragic farce – not because it wasn’t decently organized, and not because its aims aren’t laudable and even necessary . . . but because it was hijacked. Badly.

Carole and I went, skeptical but hopeful and supportive. A panel of nonprofit leaders, local elected officials, and law enforcement officers related stories of recent, disturbing incidents of incivility in Portland, as well as acts of assistance and kindness. The former included accounts of abusive street behavior, a vagrant begging leftovers from passersby and then disgustedly tossing the food in the gutter because he doesn’t like pasta, and drunk and disorderly young people from the suburbs whooping it up downtown or on the MAX light rail train.

One story showed that deteriorating behavior on the streets could (and probably has) cost the city huge amounts of money. A representative of Travel Oregon, the nonprofit that promotes tourism and conventions, was taking a pair of event planners from out of town around the city when a panhandler accosted them, wouldn’t take no, followed them onto a MAX train, and made them fear for their safety. The impact of a lost 2018 convention event and possibly the spread of the story to other planners could conceivably be in the millions. This and other stories were noted in an op-ed in the Portland Business Journal a week later.

A Quiet, Ambivalent "No" on Fluoridation in Portland

When I show people around the downtown as a guide for Portland Walking Tours, I joke that we Portlanders love to protest things.

Much as we love our city, I tell visitors, we also like to get worked up about stuff and make a lot of noise. Out-of-towners (and sometimes recent arrivals or even longtime residents) who join my tour get to see statues that provoked controversy, as well as the blocks where the Occupy Portland camp settled for more than five weeks in 2011. I was there, as regular readers of this blog well know.

This week’s vote on fluoridation of Portland’s water has provoked a public furor that has been no laughing matter, however. Over the past few months it’s been surprisingly loud, fierce, and unrelenting. Each side has accused the other of stealing campaign signs, and arguments among my Facebook friends have been spirited, to say the least.

Supporting the move to fluoridate the city’s water are most health and science authorities, from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to the American Dental Association. All of the city’s newspapers, from the Oregonian to the bi-weekly Portland Tribune and the alternative weeklies Willamette Week and the Portland Mercury, have urged voters to say yes.

Can You Believe the Nerve of Some People?

Tonight I experienced the most miserable evening at a symphony concert I’ve had in a long time.

Not because of the orchestra itself, or the programming. In fact, the evening had promised to be both exciting and lovely.

The first half consisted of pieces by Stravinsky -- my favorite composer, if I may be said to have one; and the headliner was the L.A. Guitar Quartet performing Rodrigo’s “Concierto Andaluz.” Plus, the concert would finish with the seldom-performed “Suite from The Incredible Flutist” by American composer Walter Piston, to be recorded live for the Oregon Symphony’s next CD.

What made the evening an ordeal was the young woman sitting in the next row in front of me, and her obsession with her smartphone.

About 15 minutes before showtime I settled in my seat and studied the program notes. In the row ahead and one seat to my right I noticed a striking young woman -- sharp-featured, well-coiffed, and showily dressed. Based on her appearance, I guessed she might be an Eastern European or Russian/Ukrainian “import bride,” especially since her companion, further to the right, was a much older white gentleman, heavy-set, white-haired, and balding.

She was busily taking photographs of herself with her smartphone, trying to get the concert stage in the photo behind her. Is being at the symphony such a big deal for her, I wondered, or is she just vain? Stage announcements included the usual admonishments to shut off one’s electronic devices, and then Oregon Symphony Music Director Carlos Kalmar spoke for several minutes about the evening’s program.

See David Loftus in "Story Time for Grownups" on March 18

Click the image for details!

URGENT: HELP FIND DAVID LOFTUS

From David's wife, Carole:

 3/2/2013
David and his brother Toby set out from Portland, Oregon for Sun River, Oregon at 5pm on Friday  March 1st and never arrived. If anyone hears from either of them or learns of a crash between Portland and the Bend area, please call me immediately: 

 The car they were driving is a silver SAAB station wagon, Oregon license plate number 063-CSE. The route taken may have been OR 22 east of Salem to OR 20 to Bend. 

 IF YOU ARE IN THE AREA AND HAVE ANY INFORMATION REGARDING DAVID AND TOBY, PLEASE CONTACT CAROLE LOFTUS IMMEDIATELY.

U P D A T E :

From Carole:

Just got a call. They have been found. I do not know many details. They evidently got stuck in the snow and hiked through the woods all night to Breitenbush. 

Another Year of Wonderful Reading

This is going to be an extra-long blog post because it wasn’t written for this blog. It was my submitted essay for Steve Duin’s annual reading contest. Duin is a columnist for the Oregonian who started hosting an informal “reading contest” some years back, mostly to encourage people to read more and to talk about what they’ve been reading. I’ve entered the contest a number of times, usually place respectably but never near the top. He reported this year’s results at the beginning of this week, and as often happens, I got mentioned in his column.

Here’s the essay I wrote for this past year of reading. . . . 

*   *   *   *   *

When people congratulate me on “doing what you love,” they’re usually talking about the acting and modeling career that has reared its unlikely head over the past several years. But I’d rather be reading. You might say I’ve arranged my professional and private life largely to accommodate my pleasure reading.

I would imagine a majority of the folks who post big numbers in the reading contest are either in school or retired. At 53, I’m a long way from either end of that spectrum, making less income than I have in years, yet happy in my reading habits. I started stage acting in Portland in earnest in 2005, and went free-lance as an actor and wordsmith (writing, editing, proofreading) in the summer of 2009. But I still probably spend more time reading. Everything else is little more than an excuse for that.

TGI(not)F - The Irrelevance of Weekends

Every time my local bank gets a new teller, I have to train her (or him).

Most retail service workers have a verbal routine or “tic” that comes (or at least develops) with the job. Clothing store clerks wander over and say, “May I help you find something?” Waiters coo “Is everything all right?” anywhere from one to fifteen minutes after serving you … although it appears to be a point of pride to do it as quickly as possible; I’ve had the question posed before I’d taken a bite of the entrée.

(My family traveled in the former Yugoslavia in 1970, and I remember my parents being struck by how refreshing it was that shop owners actually seemed taken aback or pleasantly surprised to be asked what something cost. They just stood by, silently beaming, while we wandered through their place, as if proud just to be a business owner or to have a visitor looking over their offerings.)

At least the clothing store and restaurant queries have some semblance of a rational connection to the business relationship between yourself and the employee. As potential customer or diner, you might indeed have a response that relates to your needs.

But at my bank, the conversational gambit invariably involves a reference to the weekend. On a Monday or Tuesday, the teller might ask: “Did you have a good weekend?” On a Thursday or Friday, it’s “Got any plans for the weekend?”

This always catches me up short. I don’t have weekends, really. In the three and a half years since I lost my last day job and went free-lance as a wordsmith and actor/model, anything can happen, on any day.

Guns Do NOT Make Us Safer - the LAPD Shows Us Why

The erroneous shootings of innocent civilians by the Los Angeles Police Department this week were a perfect example of why more firearms are precisely the wrong solution to the problem of thousands of annual gun fatalities in this country.

The NRA asserts that in order to avoid future mass killings such as the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut last December, we need more armed guards and teachers carrying firearms in elementary schools -- and more armed civilians in general.

The LAPD showed us this week why that’s NOT the answer.

On Tuesday morning at about 5:30 a.m., during a manhunt for a former Navy Reservist and Los Angeles police officer named Christopher Dorner, LAPD officers shot two Hispanic women who were delivering newspapers in a Torrance housing tract. Dorner is an African-American male.

Four days before, Dorner had shot two people in Irvine as part of what he termed a campaign of “unconventional and asymmetrical warfare” on the Los Angeles Police Department for wrongfully terminating him. Very early on Tuesday morning, he had been spotted in Riverside and shot two officers in their marked patrol car; one died, the other was critically wounded but survived.

Eluding the Germs; plus, Mohamud verdict and Tully's sale

Is the ’flu season over when Punxsutawney Phil pokes his head out of the ground?

It’s been a nerve-wracking winter so far. In years past, when stories ran in the media about the progress of the latest version(s) of influenza, I could feel reasonably safe, because I spend most of my working day at home. I don’t go to an office anymore where I’m trapped with other people who have come in to work still sick, and I don’t have to ride germ-ridden buses and trains every day.

Regular readers of this blog may remember a commentary I posted two years ago about wee beasties in our modern, tech-laden world.

For the past four to six weeks, though, many of my local Facebook friends have been bitching and moaning about a really rough bout of the ’flu this year -- and in a few cases, some appear to have suffered more than one round!

Wednesday night I went to the final rehearsal for a staged reading of three new short plays scheduled for this Saturday, and at least three of the five other people in the room were recovering from bad colds. One had experienced laryngitis as part of her sickness, and was only just coming out of that.

When it’s both that widespread and that close, I get to feeling paranoid and surrounded on all sides.

Business as (un)Usual

More than two years ago — two years and two months, actually — I wrote on this blog about the breaking news story of a 19-year-old “Islamic terrorist” who had tried to detonate what he thought was a bomb in downtown Portland a few blocks from my apartment.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud attempted to explode a bomb in Pioneer Square during a Christmas tree lighting ceremony for which thousands of people from the Portland metro area had gathered. But the bomb was a harmless fake, supplied to Mohamud by the FBI, which had been assisting him for the preceding four months in the person of an undercover agent posing as an Islamic terrorist.

In custody ever since, Mohamud finally went on trial this week in federal court for the alleged attempt at a terrorist bombing. The court is also just a few blocks from the site of the alleged bombing attempt, and maybe ten blocks from my apartment. (In fact it overlooks the two parks where Occupy Portland made its encampment a little over a year ago, between Oct. 6 and Nov. 12, 2011.) As I write, the undercover FBI agent who made contact with the teenager in July 2010 is testifying about their activities between that July and his November 26 arrest.

Coffee . . . Black, White, and Green

Friday morning’s news that the bankrupt Seattle coffee chain Tully’s had been purchased by an investment group that includes Patrick Dempsey, the star of “Grey’s Anatomy” (often referred to as “Dr. McDreamy”) brought up a lot of coffee-related thoughts and memories.

Coffee is ubiquitous in our jacked-in, high-tech world. Local stores and national chains are routinely mobbed every weekday morning before people settle down to their PCs and cubicles; then again at mid-morning breaks, at noon, and even after quitting time. Apparently, many teens and even pre-teens get a daily caffeine fix.

I did not grow up drinking coffee. I have no idea whether my parents ever drank it. I know we had tea from my mother’s Japanese upbringing. I vaguely remember my father liked a roasted-grain substitute for coffee called Postum.

When I was a kid, I associated coffee with the Folgers ads that had “Mrs. Olson” purring “it’s the richest kind” about the “mountain grown, for better flavor” brand. Coffee was just a thing that grownups drank; a bit stodgy and a lot less cool than cigarettes (which didn’t interest me, either). You pictured commercial coffee bulbs and squat white mugs in greasy spoon restaurants and church kitchens.

Fight Tactics for the Online Crusader

As I mentioned the other day, in the weeks since the Clackamas Town Center shooting and the mass killing at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, I’ve engaged in many debates with people on Facebook about gun control.

I’m not going to repeat those arguments . . . yet. What I wanted to examine today was the meta-issue of how to talk with people you violently disagree with, and probably more important, why. As a veteran of several decades of online firefights -- back in the days of Usenet, some of the most heated arguments I got into occurred on the Camille Paglia discussion list -- I’ve had a lot of experience with Internet battles.

I have a couple of Facebook friends -- people I probably linked up with as friends of friends, rather than people I know personally -- who are staunch gun rights advocates. I don’t go out of my way to antagonize these folks; I just calmly dispute some of their assertions to one another on an irregular basis. We go back and forth a while, and then I wander off.

A few days ago, one of that crowd typed in a comment whose like I’ve seen many times in the course of Internet debates on any number of subjects. “Give it up,” he told the ally who was arguing with me; “Not going to change a liberal mindset … Can’t be won.”

Back Again

Wow, where does the time go?

If I were to guess the last time I posted to this blog, I would have said two months ago . But it's been three.

That's going to change. I'll make this one short and sweet -- with the promise that there will be plenty to come. Soon.

2012 was a difficult but interesting year, not only for the nation and the world but for me. 2013 no doubt offers more of the same, though I'm not inclined to play the predictions game.

As I stated here a year ago, I also don't make New Year's resolutions, because they strike me as an exercise in setting oneself up to fail. Too often, we resolve to fix or stop doing something, and one simple misstep becomes an automatic black mark . . . and an inducement to give up.

I prefer to be more general and vague; I set some goals for the year. Not so much specific, tangible goals, because again, too many things are out of our control and it's easy for bad luck to look like personal failure. Rather, I resolve at the back of my head to do more of this or that . . . to push my life and activities in a direction that brings me closer to the kind of person I want to be.

That includes writing. With regard to this blog, I can predict a substantial increase in activity. I've certainly not lacked ideas for topics to write about.

As you might guess, in recent weeks I've had a number of debates with various folks on Facebook about gun control, a subject on which I've had occasion to write before. Recent news headlines and online firefights have provided fodder for multiple future commentaries. There are new developments in news events I wrote about a year or two ago, such as the supposed 2010 Pioneer Square "terrorist bomber," Mohamed Mohamud.

There's also recent news about how the government suppressed the Occupy movement last year, terming it a "terrorist threat" while at the same time admitting that Occupy was a peaceful movement. I participated in a small way in Occupy Portland, and wrote a lot on this blog about what I observed. The latest news outpaces what my paranoid imagination can devise about how "they're out to get us."

2012 was also a good year for pleasure reading. I read a total of 160 books and more than 50,000 pages, so I imagine there might be a thing or two to say about that, the way I wrote about reading Proust more than a year ago. And there's always plenty to say about the latest electronic gadgets, Americans' lemming-like race to own and be owned by them, and their effects of our voracious demand on the lives (and deaths) of people on the other side of the globe.

Stay tuned.

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.