Category: All (-ish)

Wordstock 2015

Wordstock is Portland’s festival of books and Portland, being a very book-friendly city, loves Wordstock.  It’s been on hiatus for two or so years because it wasn’t really making enough money, but it’s back, sponsored by Literary Arts and hosted at the Portland Art Museum. Previously it was at the Convention Center.  Wordstock has been listed in my calendar since they announced the date in the spring.  I was very much looking forward to the festival.  Sadly, my excitement was not enough to carry me through the many problems I encountered.

Tickets were $15.00 and I bought mine in September.  Following the instructions in an email I recieved, I arrived at the venue more than an hour early.  I found the line to check in stretched around the block.  This was the pre-sale line.  Wanting to skip that line, I decided to purchase another ticket inside, where the line was five people long.

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I had some time to kill, so after planning my day, I decided to find all the venues so I could move quickly from one to the other.  The map in my Wordstock guide was not very clear and I ended up wandering through a modern art gallery until I hit a dead end.  On the way I saw a sign that indicated that this would be a pop-up thing at some point in the day.  What were these pop-up things?

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The pop-up events were not listed in my schedule.  There was just one poster listing the many pop-up events.  Both times I went by, this is how many people were crowded around it.

IMG_4725I waited in line for my first event, then was told where I was waiting was not the line and moved myself into the actual line.    This was a good panel, where David Leviathan appeared to be texting during the panel, but was actually purchasing his book via phone, because he was going to grab one from the sales floor, but couldn’t actually get to the sales floor.  This is when alarm bells should have started going off. 
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Exiting my first session, I joined the line to get into the next session.  It had started to rain (and it was a cold, hard rain) and there were too many people trying to get in and out of the same doors.  Several people cut in line, saying “I’m not buying tickets” and then ignoring us when we said we weren’t buying tickets either.  Nothing was done about any line cutters.

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I eventually made it inside to the inside line for Wendell Pierce, but when the presentation started, I was still standing outside.

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Because I only needed one seat (the plus of attending on my own) I eventually got a seat in the actual venue.
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Though they had crowd control in the venue itself there were people pressed into all of these bays listening.

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This guy had apparently been out with Mr. Pierce drinking the night before.  He took several poor quality photos with his phone.  I wished I could have given him my camera so he could have had some good ones.

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My next session was in the same building, so I figured that I would be able to make it.  I again encountered a very long line.  I again encountered line cutters.  I was told that I probably wasn’t going to make it into the venue.   Frustrated, I took a break at this desk, thinking maybe I would go upstairs for a while to see what the book market looked like.  But the line to go upstairs was just as crowded as the line to go into the room I wasn’t going to get into.  I was frustrated and angry and I came to the conclusion that I could be this frustrated and angry for the rest of the day, or I could go home.

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I chose going home.  On my way to the Max stop, I caught this picture of the line for another venue.  It was 15 minutes into the presentation and the line was still a block and a half long.

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Ironically, while waiting for the Max a bus went by with an ad for Wordstock.
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I heard later that they sold 4000 presale tickets, plus the tickets sold day-of.  All four stages together couldn’t hold 4000 people, not to mention they didn’t have crowd control for that many people.  The news coverage I read was mostly laudatory and the only thing I could think was that the reporters didn’t have to wait in any lines.  Perhaps next year I should go with a press pass.

I’ve rarely been so disappointed.  Which I guess means I’m lucky overall, but doesn’t take away the sting of missing out on a bunch of sessions I was looking forward to.

The old neighborhood

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That “luxury” apartment tower on the left occupies the same space of my beloved first residence in Portland: the Rose Friend* Apartments.  What was a five-story (maybe six?) building of studios and one-bedroom apartments that were in good, if bland 70’s refurbishment, condition have been replaced by studio and one bedroom apartments renting for much more than I could ever afford.  Right now a 500 square foot studio is priced at $1365-1525 per month.  My 342 square foot cost $500 in 2002 and had risen to $525 when I moved out in 2005.

In the foreground is the Sovereign, which is moving all its current tenants out by the end of this year. Such tenants include a gentleman who has lived in the building since 1980 and currently pays $750/month in rent.  He’s not going to find that anywhere else downtown.  As a grocery store checker, he won’t have much room in his budget to afford other things.

I loved living downtown, but I think downtown doesn’t have room for people like me.  Not the me who rented an apartment with only a temporary job, and not the me of today with my modest salary.  It’s a shame.

*Also sometimes called Rosefriend and Rosefriends.  Even when I lived there I was never quite sure how to write my rent check.

A study in contrasts

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From Time Magazine, an article about top teenagers.  What struck me first was the difference between the two young women.  Kylie Jenner, looking just like the fashion icon she is, contrasted with Olivia Hallisey who looks like a very nice girl, one who I want to whisper to her to stand up straight.  And which young woman do you want your daughter to be?  The one who developed a better way to test for Ebola, or the one with cosmetically enhanced lips who has 60 million social media followers?  I’d love to see more coverage of young women with flat hair and no makeup who need to throw back their shoulders.  And maybe less of young women who are models and reality TV stars.

Wordstock Refund

The first thing I did when I came home was change into dry clothing.  The second thing I did was write this email to Wordstock.  They contacted me on November 10 to say that the Portland Art Museum would be processing a refund, which I appreciate.  As of this writing I  have not received the refund.

7 November, 2015

Literary Arts
925 SW Washington St.
Portland, OR 97205

To whom it may concern:

I put Wordstock on my calendar months ago, when the date was first announced. I bought my ticket on September 13, as soon as I knew they were available to the public.  This morning, I printed my ticket, exchanged the pens in my bag for pencils and made sure to arrive more than an hour before the first presentation, because I was told there would be lines.

When I arrived at the venue, the line for pre-paid tickets stretched around the block.  Seeking to avoid that line, I purchased another ticket because there was no waiting for people who didn’t plan ahead.  I then attempted to find the various venues in the Mark Building but got lost in the museum due to the poor map.  I gave up my search and went to stand in line for the McMenamins stage at the Whitsell Auditorium.

Because I was in line 30 minutes before the 10:00 session, I was able to attend that session which was great.  I stood in line in the rain for the 11:00 session, then stood in line inside to get into the room, then listened to the first 15 minutes of the presentation outside the room while I waited to get in.  I noted that several people chose to jump to the front of the line and were not turned away for their efforts.

As with the 11:00 session, I immediately got in line for the 12:00 session, which was in the same building.  The room exceeded capacity before I could get in.  Facing wall-to-wall people, with no clear path to go anywhere, not to the bathroom, not to the Book Fair, not to any session I had planned on going to, I gave up and headed for home.  Walking to the Max train, I saw the line for the First Congregational Church had stretched around the block to Broadway, and this was 10 minutes after the session had started.

I enjoyed a previous Wordstock experience, and waited patiently for the next one. I bought my ticket as soon as I could, and I expressed my excitement about attending the event via social media.  As with the last Wordstock, I expected to attend the sessions I chose in their entirety, then walk to the next session of my choice and have reasonably easy entry into the next session of my choice.

Your event did not meet my expectations and I am requesting a full refund of my $15.00 ticket.  (Note that I never got my book voucher, not that I could have gotten to the Book Fair to spend the voucher in the first place.)

Sincerely,
Patricia Collins

Coming soon: Criss-Cross Crosswalk

When I was 11, my aunts took my brother and I to Hawaii.  We stayed on Molokai (wonderful beaches, big waves!) and visited Honolulu, which I was much less charmed with as I got gum on the side of my nice suede sandals and the beaches were not as clean as on Molokai.  But the cool thing that Honolulu did have was criss-cross crosswalks.  These were crosswalks where all traffic would stop and the pedestrians could cross any which way, including diagonally! This delighted my brother and I to no end.
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Guess what?  Coming soon to this very intersection in my own town will be a criss-cross crosswalk.  Although apparently the official term is  “pedestrian scramble.”  Which I think is not nearly as good of a term and someone in the paper observed “sounds like a term for what a cannibal would eat for brunch.”

Anyway, coming soon!  Very exciting!

Crayons in desk are older than me.

I cleaned out my work desk today and found these gems.  I’m pretty sure both are from long before I was born.  I can’t say for sure the price of crayons during the 70s & 80s, but it sure wasn’t fifteen cents.  (And as an indication as to how far we are from that price, I just had to write out the amount because I don’t have a cents sign available to me in this writing platform.)
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None of them looked like they’s been colored with.

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I put them back in their cases and sent them off to the Goodwill. If you hear a media story about really old crowns selling for hundreds of dollars, don’t tell me about it.

Three sentence movie reviews: Inside Out

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This movie continues the tradition of Animated Films Watched at the Laurelhurst Which Affect Me Much More than I Thought They Would.  This is a brilliant film, crafted much more for adults than children, but be warned, it is a heavy film.  I attended it with a full-grown adult, but if I had brought children along, there would have been more than one place where said child would have asked me, “Why are you crying?”

Cost:  $4.00
Where watched: Laurelhurst Theater with Matt

poster from: http://www.impawards.com/2015/inside_out.html
Boy-oh-boy do I hate the poster.  The German one is a little better:

http://www.impawards.com/2015/inside_out_ver19.html

 

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Requiem: YRUU sweatshirt.

It was 2002 when I signed up to be an advisor for the Young Religious Unitarian Universalist (YRUU) group. That’s code for “high school youth group” at the UU church.  I had recently 1)moved to Portland, 2)joined First Unitarian Church. When I signed on, I was still living with my Aunt, Matt and I were flirting, but thing had gotten going, and I was temping at Wedbush Morgan.    By the time my first year of YRUU was done I had moved into a studio apartment downtown, Matt and I were a thing, I had quit working for Wedbush Morgan and started graduate school at PSU.

When I signed on, it was only me who had made a firm commitment, with maybe Jimmy, one of the current co-advisors, sticking around for another year or so.  By the time we started in the fall there were five adults total: myself, Jimmy, Frank, Chris and Eric.  Dana, the head of Religious Education for Youth, broke us in.  We had an amazing group of kids that year, with Kitty, one of the few seniors, setting the tone.  She loved the song “Take me Home, Country Roads” and we sang it a lot that year and in nearly all the years to follow.  She also realized that by pressing your hands together you could make a chalice, which is the symbol of Unitarian Universalism.  So that was cool and it went on the back of our sweatshirts.
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On the front it said YRUU, which was not only the name of the group, but also an excellent question.  We had shirts or sweatshirts every year, but this first one remained my favorite.  For seven wonderful years I got to hang out with incredibly cool high school kids.  Seemingly a million things changed during that time, while everything also stayed the same.

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It is with sadness I say goodbye to the YRUU sweatshirt, but it lives on in many happy YRUU memories.