I say it's Spring

According to the calendar, Spring is weeks off but here in Portland it's well ahead of time. It made for a nice walk today for Ralphie and I, especially along Sellwood Blvd, where I found my dream house (or houses). Not only is this a beautiful old home with a beautiful old cherry tree out front (along with a beautiful not-so-old resident), but it offers what might be the best view in Portland. Sellwood Blvd sits on a ridge overlooking Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge and the Willamette River, with a clear view of downtown. Far down below is a walking and biking path, part of the 40-mile Springwater Corridor. The steep wooded hillside between road and path is already packed with songbirds.



I'm just having a little trouble deciding whether the nice lady should give me her house, or if I'd rather have one just down the street, because the other house has a widow's walk and therefore even a better view.



And this house is right next to Sellwood City Park, a real gem tucked away from traffic, while still a short hike to the Bybee-Milwaukie stores and antique row. Maybe the people who live here should give me their house instead.


Ralphie doesn't seem to care, just so long as I shut up and let him walk.


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Random Photo of the Day

Chickadee comes to visit and very very quickly grab a seed. This is the first time I've had decent light on the balcony when shooting (through the glass) the bird feeder.

Pulling the thread

One of the great joys of my life has been discovering new music. In the late 60s and early 70s, this usually meant trusting the judgment of reviewers at Rolling Stone, having a friend with similar taste put on an LP, or tracking down musicians as they left one band and joined or formed another. After 40 years or so, I have no memory of how I found the Keef Hartley Band, unless I followed up with him after his stint with John Mayall's Bluesbreakers. All I know is I fell in love with the band largely because of the vocal and guitar contributions of Miller Anderson.



Eh, not the greatest video, but finding any good footage from that era is mostly just luck. As he was leaving the Keef Hartley Band, Anderson released his first solo album, Bright City, with a much more jazz and folk orientation than the blues rock the band had produced, except for one very bluesy track. The haunting title song would surface in my memory off and on for years, long after the LP had been stuck away with hundreds of others as I was seduced by the ease of CDs.

When I bought my first CD, I swore I wasn't falling into the trap of replacing albums I already had on LP--an oath that must have lasted a week. Instead, many of the CDs I bought were to replace old favorites that over time had been overwhelmed by the pops and skips of long use. Being able to clap on headphones and listen to something like Paul Butterfield's long East/West instrumental in pristine clarity was impossible to resist. Unfortunately, a lot of the music I'd acquired was simply not being reissued on CD.

Within the last decade or so, the recommendations from friends like Ryan and Charlie included music from "my" era, the late 60s and early 70s (before Ryan was even born) that I'd never heard, from a lot of musicians I'd never heard of. Much of the music came from overseas, primarily from the UK, music that hadn't penetrated our close-knit world of California.

Thanks to the Internet I discovered digital versions of much of it and eventually acquired the equipment needed to digitize my LPs--which is a lot of work. So much easier to track down files online or CDs issued by tiny record labels, many of them from Europe. I recently reacquired the Keef Hartley Band albums, and without much confidence did a search for Miller Anderson. It should probably have been no surprise that he's still working, still touring and still producing exceptionally fine music--with a website that included Bright City as a CD. Webmaster Ada responded to an email to tell me they still had a few copies and, if I wanted, she could have Anderson autograph one (see above). And so she did. I bought that and a copy of Bluesheart, a fine blues album from 2003. (Thanks to the Royal Mail and the USPS, the package took three days from Brighton, England to Portland!) The "exception" I mentioned on Bright City is a solid blues cut that appears to have become a signature for Miller Anderson. A version kicks off Bluesheart and I found a video of him performing the song in Moscow:



Before the CDs had arrived, I'd already picked up another recent album featuring Anderson, a Live from Glasgow recording by a group called The British Blues Quintet, five musicians who had been playing live and in studios, with a constantly shifting group of fellow musicians, since the 60s. The album "features" Maggie Bell, and a casual study made her sound very intriguing, with comparisons to Janis Joplin. In the late 60s, Bell had been the lead singer for Stone the Crows, yet another musical group I'd never listened to. I did have a faint memory that I'd heard of them, but only because of the bizarre death of lead guitarist Les Harvey, who had been electrocuted during a sound check. As far as I can tell, Stone the Crows had never made a dent in the American market and certainly hadn't surfaced on West Coast radio. Harvey's death finished the band, but not until they had produced some brilliant music--how had I missed them?




Listening to Stone the Crows brought me full circle--back to discovering "new" music from the late 60s, music I would have eaten alive back then which became something miraculous in 2010. And I'm pleased to report that Miller Anderson and Maggie Bell are still brilliant. (YouTube also has a three-part live Stone the Crows concert from Paris that runs over 20 minutes and makes the comparisons to Joplin a little more understandable.)

Random Photo of the Day

There is always a lot of tugboat traffic down on the Willamette. Sometimes we forget that the city began here to use that river as a highway and that it's still very much in use. Most of the time, the tugs I see are pushing big or even huge barges. Today, it looks more like someone has decided to move the house.

We're Bushtits!!!

On New Year's Eve, I bought two bird feeders from the nice people at the Back Yard Bird Shop on Fremont. I hung the seed and suet feeders on my balcony and waited a long time for any visitors. Now I'm getting two varieties of chickadee, a few sparrows, the occasional nuthatch and a cheery swarm of bushtits. It would be nice if I could get better lighting, but a few of these photos aren't terrible. Updated with more photos, including a nuthatch!

Bushtits in January

Pixar for Grownups

The animated film, Up, had somehow completely slipped past my radar when it was released in 2009. As much as I now regret missing it on the big screen, it's unlikely I would have made the effort to see it in a theater. I mean, it's just a cartoon, right? Instead, I watched the DVD last night, and it was so good it inspired me to wake my blog up to write about it. As my title suggests, I consider this to be the first Pixar film and one of the rare animated films created for grownups rather than for kids. I don't suggest that previous Pixar films and many other made-for-children animated movies can't be appreciated by adults, just that this may be one movie not particularly appreciated by kids.

The plot synopsis from IMDB is simple enough: By tying thousands of balloon to his home, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America. Frankly, that didn't inspire me much at all and it doesn't begin to capture the beauty of the story created by Pete Docter, Bob Peterson and Thomas McCarthy. The first 15-20 minutes of the film, beginning in familiar territory with a small boy becoming captivated by a heroic explorer then moves through a montage of Carl's life that stands as a brilliant gem of animation all by itself. Beautiful and emotionally rich, that montage had me so choked up and damp-eyed I took a break from the DVD.

And then Pixar went into completely unfamiliar (forbidden?) territory: the protagonist is an old man! A really old guy, who creaks and groans just getting from bed to front porch, and who needs a walker to get anywhere. And what I love most is that the writers avoided the most obvious cliches to set up the adventure, because Carl is not a cranky, bitter old goat looking back on an empty life devoid of meaning or moment, ripe for redemption and enlightenment, but a 78-year-old man who has lived an emotionally full and joyous life. Well, he is a bit cranky, but I can relate.

The remainder of the film is "just" the usual gorgeous Pixar animation. The tone changes dramatically, with plenty of adventure and humor. You have to have great animals in a film like this, of course, and Up has several, including a (naturally) lovable dog named Dug, and funny bits for people who know dogs. Squirrel!

When recommending the film elsewhere, I wrote something like "While it's not the greatest animated film ever..." which then begs the question, what is the greatest animated film ever? And that turned out not to have a simple answer. When I was a child, I saw Fantasia in the theater and it lodged itself in my consciousness forever. According to Wikipedia, I saw it in SuperScope and stereo. Although it was a money-loser in early releases, Fantasia set the bar for animation pretty high. So had Snow White & the Seven Dwarves, Pinocchio and Dumbo. These movies were beautiful, amazing stories brought to life by thousands of hours of painstaking work. I cannot imagine there is any dispute that they are at or near the top of any list (and here, I have to admit a gaping hole in my own viewing: Japanese animated films).

I struggle with a definition of "great animated films", beyond an obvious OhMyGod factor such as those Disney films possessed. Because of the nature of animation, there is also a HowDidTheyDoThat?! factor, usually the product of a technical breakthrough. If we award "great" based on that factor, we have to include Gertie the Dinosaur, which Windsor McKay reportedly created on a bet, and took on tour in 1914. And Mickey Mouse in Steamboat Willie, which had sound! (I'm old enough to be astonished to learn that you can actually watch both of these films online, from the comfort of your own PC.)

There had been a few examples of mixing live action with animation, but never anything as thorough and as astonishing as 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? which not only broke down the wall between toons and humans, but even walls between studios. A piano duet with Daffy and Donald ducks? That's just not possible! Judging from online lists, Roger appears to have fallen from view, but it remains a personal favorite.


Another favorite is Nick Park's brilliant claymation film, The Wrong Trousers, with Wallace and Gromit (and, honestly, other W&G films that followed). Besides being terribly funny, Park's work has always had a huge HowDidTheyDoThat?! factor going for it.

In 1995, Pixar pretty well nailed down the HowDidTheyDoThat?! once and for all with Toy Story. They've done it so consistently since then, in fact, that they may well have removed the wow factor of technology entirely from consideration. There's no more HowDidTheyDoThat?! left; we expect a Pixar film or any film competing with Pixar's product to have incredible graphics, and anything less would be a disappointment.

Which is not to say that great animation cannot be achieved without AmazingTechnology! Very high on my personal list is the 2003 French surrealist film, The Triplets of Belleville, which is an astonishing and original masterpiece of the art.

(That struggle to list the "greatest" animated film has, for the most part, assumed the answer was in feature-length films. Otherwise, mine would be an easy list featuring Chuck Jones, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny.)

When all is said and done, does Up make the list? I have no idea, except to say that it's a terrific movie and you should see it. Just be sure the pack your hankies.

Dancing Crow

As I've mentioned before, I like crows. This crow is dancing for the joy of sunshine at Ecola State Park on the Oregon Coast.